March of 1948. Three years have passed since the Great Patriotic War ended in victory, disposing into the streets of the destroyed and hungry cities and villages brave decorated soldiers: thousands of them having been burned, maimed, or disfigured beyond recognition. On a crowded commuter train, Maria hears an invalid singing, which painfully connects her to her time at the front and to the love that failed to happen to her. Why, then, since that day, does the voice from the past echo so insistently in her present life? The torture of uncertainty—was it really Armen?—intensifies after the next encounter and leaves her with an unsettling compulsion to do . . . what? Help him? Or, rather, rescue herself from her lonely and unassuming existence her heart subtly rejects? She must decide whether she is willing to let go of the life she knows for feelings she had never thought she could experience. But, first, she has to find him. As the genocide of 1915 within the Ottoman Empire destroyed the lives of Armen’s parents and about one-and-a-half-million ethnic Armenians, his future is shattered by this other war and betrayal. Legless and totally alone, and without any family after his mother is gone, it seems the most merciful thing for him would be to end his miserable existence by leaping off a cliff. Otherwise, he must find the courage to continue living in the condition the war left him and find his place in the bitter every-day reality full of difficulties prone to men like him. Maria and Armen. Each carries private wounds. In the face of despair, will fate offer them a chance to heal their souls and hearts?
The year is 1948. Life for Maria is bleak in post-war Moscow. Her days are a blur of loneliness and monotony as she makes her way through life, from her job to the train to her small rooms, and then back again. Then, just when she is complacent in her quiet despair, she hears a voice on a crowded train car that brings back a sea of memories of the recent war, and a spark is lit within her.
From this first scene, the novel then leaps back to the past, to 1941, to the days when Russia first felt the sting of a German attack on its soil. As the bombs fall on Moscow, Maria decides she must join the Red Army to help however she can, despite her mother’s objections. She perseveres and is eventually trained in communications and sent to the front, where disaster strikes before she even arrives.
Armen’s story also begins in 1941. He is a musician, a trained singer, whose wonderful voice has been his entrée to the world, the gift that smoothed his way and brought joy to others. Now he has been conscripted into the Russian army, and all thoughts of music are put behind him.
In the flurry of events around the Battle Stalingrad, Maria and Artem meet, but Artem is soon grievously wounded and condemned to spend the rest of his days as an invalid, a casualty of war. With no family or friends, he makes his small living singing for charity on the trains, although he has no idea that someone recognizes his voice, and that this recognition will change both of their lives forever.
I must admit I found it hard getting into this novel. Maria’s story did not immediately resonate with me, and I had to push myself to keep reading at first. Her tale is the less overtly dramatic of the two, her struggle more internal than external. I never completely identified with her, and at times I did not feel her motivation and I had a few questions that were never addressed.
Nor did Artem’s thread grab my attention in the first chapters. There was a lot of unnecessary exposition and diversion, which provided some excellent history that might be worthy of its own novel, but did not really feed the plot.
But as I read on, I found myself more and more invested in the characters, particularly Artem. Ms. Osipova has created a well-rounded character in him, with flaws and virtues, talents and blind areas. He is relatable and realistic, and I liked him more and more as I read on. His story, too, was the more moving of the two threads within this novel, and by the time I finished the story I was emotionally involved in his eventual fate.
This is not a perfect novel. There are a few editorial issues, and the writing is an uneasy blend of formal - even stilted - language and colloquial usage that borders on slang and sounds almost too modern for the era. The two together are awkward bedfellows. At times it was hard to read or to understand exactly what the author intended, and I had to go back and reread some sentences a few times to pick out the meaning.
There are characters who drift in and out, whose stories could be more fully told, despite being secondary to the plot, and there are some plot points which left me with more questions than a sense of resolution. Likewise, while the author belabours some aspects of the story more than necessary, there are other places where I wanted more details. Artem’s fight with addiction, for example, was not quite brushed over, but it was never mentioned again after that part of the tale was told.
But there are also places where the author excels. Although she paints large pictures with a broad brush, her details are meticulous and vivid. The crowded train car where Maria’s story begins, for example, is limned with excruciating detail. With her words, you can see the image of a woman in a man’s shirt, the love between a man and his dog, the room at the monastery where Artem finds himself living. You can hear the voices, see the fabric, smell the food.
She also paints a vivid picture of life within the Soviet Union after the war, showing its strengths and weaknesses without judgement, in the eyes of the people living there. This, with the war scenes, provides a believable and convincing backdrop against which the events of the novel take on particular life and immediacy. I felt, at times, like I was there with the characters, and this is a special skill for an author to bring to a book.
But most important was how I felt after I turned the last page. I finished the novel with tears in my eyes, such was the emotional tug of the final chapters of the novel. In a world where books so often blend into each other, especially with some historical fiction, finding a story where the characters live beyond the page is a delight and a treat. I have thought about them, particularly Artem, almost every day since I closed the book. I wonder about them, hope they are doing well, and ponder whether I should send birthday cards. These characters, created from air, formed with drops of ink on a page or pixels on a screen, live and breathe in my head. They have hopes and aspirations and lives to live far beyond the limitations of the text. They have become real to me.
And this, to me, is what a novel should do.
Awarded 4.5 stars
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HFC Independent Editorial Reviewer
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08ZLXLJXJ
Author Bio
Marina Osipova was born in East Germany into a military family and grew up in Russia where she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. She also has a diploma as a German language translator from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. In Russia, she worked first in a scientific-technical institute as a translator then in a Government Ministry in the office of international relations, later for some Austrian firms. For seventeen years, she lived in the United States where she worked in a law firm. Eventually, she found her home in Austria. She is an award-winning author and a member of the Historical Novel Society.
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