Fiction: A soldier lies on a frozen battlefield, conscious he is dying and surrounded by the already depersonalised dead. By chance a nurse searching for the wounded is struck by his grimace and on checking his papers discovers this dead man is a decorated "hero of the Soviet Union".
She pronounces him dead. But by a stroke of further chance, something urges her to look again, and she realises he is still alive. The soldier is taken to a hospital and thanks to that same young nurse, survives.
They pledge to marry. He returns to the front. The war ends and he learns that the girl whom he has planned to wed has been seriously wounded and disfigured. Now strong and healthy, he wants to find an equally healthy woman and have a normal life. But duty makes him return to the hospital, to visit the girl he had promised to marry, the nurse who had saved his life.
A Hero's Daughter is the first novel by the now internationally established Siberian novelist, Andreï Makine. His personal story is as dramatic as any of his exquisite, philosophical fictions. Having sought asylum in France in 1987, he lived rough in a cemetery in Paris. During that time he wrote this novel in French. It was eventually published in 1990, after he had pretended it had been translated from Russian, as he could not find a publisher who would believe a Russian could write in French.
Makine, who was born in 1957, continued to write. His fourth novel, Le Testament Français (1995), won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis, the first to achieve this French literary double. He was now famous and that beautiful, characteristically elegiac fourth novel became his first book to be translated into English.
Its publication in London in 1997 alerted readers to the emergence of a major European novelist. Le Testament Français was followed by three further novels, including most impressively, Requiem for the East (Paris 2000; London 2001) and the subtle perfection of the novella, A Life's Music (2002), a miracle of a book and another Makine elegy blessed by the ease of Chekhov with echoes of the great German writer, W.G. Sebald, and of course, shaped by Makine's singular limpid allure.
The horrors of war and its brutal legacy of displacement, as well as the multiple shifts and chances that determine a life, are Makine's themes. Initially, A Hero's Daughter reads as a first novel, it is raw and angry, far less lyric, and his now familiar themes are presented directly rather than gradually. This first novel is not as haunting as his subsequent works, yet like them it has the weight of life. There is a bluntness that will surprise his readers accustomed by now to his eloquent grace.
So it may be easy - and wrong - to assume that this is a minor, apprentice work only now being published in English on the strength of his international reputation. Any doubts are quickly overtaken by the urgency of the narrative. It is obvious that as early as his first book, Makine, part poet, part philosopher, was a gifted artist.
The soldier who returned out of duty to bid farewell to the nurse who had saved him, finds himself incapable of leaving her. Instead they marry and against the odds presented by her wounds, and the loss of a first baby, eventually produce a healthy child, the daughter of the title.
The understated, low-key narrative follows Makine's "hero", the soldier whose life after the war amounts to very little, a lowly job and the occasional chance to talk about his wartime experiences. As the years pass, the old soldier becomes confused about what really happened in the war, history takes over from memory. Myth supplants fact and eventually he realises he has taken to lying about his past. His medals have become burdens, things he can no longer live up to.
Meanwhile, his daughter Olya has done well, probably better than she might have had her father not been a decorated soldier, "a hero of the Soviet Union". She is beautiful and clever, given the chance to serve her country, and of wearing better clothes. She thinks she is a translator. But her "job" is to charm visiting diplomats, drug them and then search their hotel rooms for information. Not quite a spy, she is more of an amateur call girl.
Just as her father, a simple man given to drinking away his time, has been betrayed by life, so too is she. By "serving" her country in the way her masters have decided, she loses her fiancé, who dissociates himself from her with all the skill of the professional diplomat he is. Her mother dies and her father sinks lower and lower, desperate for vodka to the point of pawning his medals. Throughout this intensely described collapse of idealism and dreams, Makine evokes the sense of Russia changing, of a history becoming confused and lost.
His other novels present Russia as a vast tragedy at the mercy of its sheer size, weight of history and its particular chaos. This early book is most clearly marked by the upheaval that added its own confusions to the collapse of communism, the ideology that had on its emergence destroyed the old Russia. There are many elements contributing to Makine's artistry, he balances personal loss with public upheaval. His grasp of history and its impact on the individual confer an epic grandeur on small books that belie their size and read as far larger works.
Not only does he evoke a real sympathy for the old soldier who knows his life more or less began and ended with the war, he has created a tragic heroine in Olya, whose beauty and talent come to betray her as cruelly as did her masters. Even as she faces a future of very little, she sees some hope and plans to retrieve her father's pawned decoration. By the close of this very human and sad story about battered lives, it is exciting to see exactly how good and real Andreï Makine's vision has been since his very first book. Here is a special writer whose path has been graced from the beginning.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
A Hero's Daughter. By Andreï Makine. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan, Sceptre, 163pp. £15.99