Nino Haratischwili

Good grief, I thought this sprawling saga would never end! I read five other books while keeping Niza and Brilka on the back burner and then dedicated two full days to trying to finish their story, but the damn book just kept going! Like EastEnders does War and Peace, or A Little Life with something to cry about (and I did tear up towards the end, I admit). Out of a cast of thousands, I actually only liked two characters - Stasia and Giorgi Alania - while the rest of the dingbat women and weak man drove me mad, especially the trifecta of Andro, Miqa and Miro Eristavi. The history of Georgia was interesting and depressing in equal parts because I knew nothing about that country, but I wish the author had narrowed her perspective to what affected the characters rather than throwing in potted text book summaries (Niza getting caught up in demonstrations, yes, political biographies, no thanks).

I can't comment on the translation, of course, but I did like the commentary on languages, especially this quote:

English tasted like sea air and like an autumn sunset on a northern coast; it smelled slightly of fish shops, a little of rain. I thought French, which I had never learned, must dissolve like apricot jam on the tongue and taste of dry white wine. Russian tasted of an endless plain, of wheat fields, of loneliness and illusions. But Georgian tasted dusty, full — almost over-full — and sometimes also like a game of hide-and-seek in the woods. By contrast, the German that Severin taught me tasted icy and bitter at first; then the flavour changed and transformed into the taste of algae, of dark green moss; then it became pungent again, but more pleasant; and later, much later, German was like ripe chestnuts in my mouth, and heights, yes, dizzying heights.

Overall, I am glad I persevered and didn't DNF but now I need to reset my brain with at least three chick lit novels limited to a word count of 300 pages or less.… (mer)

Narrator Niza has used an academic post in Berlin as an escape from her complicated family background and the traumas of her early life in Georgia, but she's pushed out of this precarious comfort zone when she finds herself looking after an adolescent niece who is seeking to connect with the past.

Haratischwili takes us through six generations and a hundred years of Georgian history: two world wars, the Russian revolution and civil war, the Stalin terror, the breakup of the Soviet Union and all the rest of the general messiness of the twentieth century. The emphasis is on the innumerable scars that are left on families and individuals by war, totalitarianism, corruption, and abuse of power, and on the difficulty of healing those scars. There are no easy answers, clearly: Haratischwili wants us to see that there are wrongs done to people that can't ever fully be put right, whether we try to do it by revenge, by hiding from them, by talking about them, by letting time pass, or even by using magical chocolate recipes.

On the shelf, this looks like a ridiculously long novel, but it never really feels like such a long book when you're actually reading it. I felt that I was being pulled into the life of the family and the times they live through in a very straightforward, natural way, and I even managed to keep most of the characters straight without resorting to drawing any family trees. Very interesting.… (mer)