In a mere 176 pages, French writer Dan Franck's My Russian Love details the history of a love affair that spans two decades. The story begins on a train when 40-year-old Luca, a successful French filmmaker, glimpses a woman in the dining car. An unusual gesture she makes transports him back in memory to Paris of the 1970s. That's when Luca, then a young film student, first met Anna, a Russian girl whose parents sent her to France to study. The two fell in love but were separated when Anna was suddenly called back to the Soviet Union. The rest of the novel follows Luca's quest to find the girl on the train and perhaps solve the mystery of Anna.
The novel is short, the story deceptively simple, but the themes Franck explores are profound ones. The author's experience as a screenwriter is apparent throughout, both in his characterization of the world Luca travels and in the scenes themselves, which are as finely crafted as if seen through the lens of a discerning cinematographer.
