As I explained a while ago, I've been reading Nino Haratischwili's big, fat 2014 novel in the language it was first written in, which is German (original title: Das achte Leben).

I enjoyed it immensely. Here, red with guts and gore, is the history of the 20th century, as reflected in the history of a Georgian family. I love family sagas, and this one is up there with the best.

First, a couple of things I didn't like... I'm not a fan of magic realism, so the recurring motif of the "cursed chocolate" I found slightly irritating. Nor did I entirely take to the way the novel was constructed. The framing story apostrophizes the narrator's orphaned niece, Brilka, and the whole saga has the ostensible objective of setting this young girl free from the host of family mysteries that are obviously playing on her mind. According to this device, Brilka sets in motion the writing of the saga by absconding from her touring dance group during their Amsterdam visit, and trying to make her way independently to Vienna to follow up some family history. The story is made up of seven "books", each representing the life of a family member. The eighth book is blank, symbolizing the goal of enabling Brilka to start with a clean slate. I didn't take to the character of Brilka, and couldn't help wondering if the book would have lost anything by just being told straightforwardly from 1900 to the present day.

Having stated both these objections, however, I must also mention this excellent critique, which discusses the symbolism of the chocolate, and sees it as not only as standing for female family tradition and origins (in the dual senses of existence and suffering), but also as contrasting (in its offer of a momentary sensation of self-forgetful pleasure) with the painstaking, trauma-confronting, balm-seeking work of family research. This is all very insightful. But I'm still not convinced...


All the photos in this post, by the way, are from our visit to Gori, Georgia, in 2019

Those objections aside, there's really much about this book to admire.

To begin with, the characters are mesmerizing, especially the key women of the Jaschi family. Cumulatively, they survive abandonment, rape, forced abortion, exile, war, revolution, bereavement, and all manner of privations. Perhaps the most memorable character is Stasia, who lives to be 99, and sees more and more ghosts as friends and family members depart before her (another magic realist touch, but I have great tolerance for ghosts). Niza, the narrator, is also intriguing. Small, misunderstood, often neglected and victimized, she constantly defies the odds in order to rescue people (Rusa, Daria, Brilka), and put back together again things that have come apart. In the enormity of this endeavour, however, she comes close to losing herself. 

Driving whole stretches of the plot is the intertwining of two families -- the Jaschis and the Eristawis -- representatives of which seem destined to keep connecting and colliding, often with tragic consequences.

Secondly, the historical sweep is staggering. According to this reviewer, Haratischwili had not intended to write such a colossal book: "Its original scope was the impact of perestroika on her home country, and former Soviet satellite, Georgia. Then a beautiful house in Tbilisi, one that she had admired every day for years, was revealed to have been owned by one of Stalin’s successors, Lavrentiy Beria. Excavations uncovered unmarked graves from the Stalin years. That, however, was no place to start. Haratischwili needed a moment in time when everything had seemed possible and opportunities endless, and for that she scrolled back to the Russian Revolution, a time of change that mirrors the novel’s ending during Georgia’s political demonstrations of 2007." (Both Beria and Stalin feature in the novel, although they are never named.)









In keeping with Haratischwili's monumental vision, we see Georgia first as part of the Russian empire, then briefly independent, then part of the Soviet Union, and finally independent again but struggling to find its identity. It has been not an easy road, and it does not necessarily favour the prosperity of its citizens, if the central family is anything to go by. They start out as comfortable and very well positioned in society. By the end, everyone is having trouble making ends meet. (Several reviewers compare it with Buddenbrooks in this respect.)

Das achte Leben is a novel, not a history book; yet it displays an understanding of the business of interpreting times gone by that much historical writing, even now, could learn from. We can, after all, never recreate the past. We can only ever offer an interpretation of it, based on what we can access, and what we choose to recall. The narrator, Niza, puts it like this:

"Years ago, when I was about your age, Brilka, I often asked myself what would happen if the collective memory of the world had preserved different things, and conversely, lost different things. If all the wars and all those innumerable kings, rulers, leaders, and mercenaries were forgotten, and the only people who remained in the books were the people who had built a house with their own hands, or laid out a garden, or discovered a giraffe, or described a cloud, or sung about the neck of a woman; I asked myself how we know that those whose names live on are better, smarter, or more interesting, just because they have stood the test of time -- what has happened to the forgotten ones?

"WE choose what to remember and what not to remember. Time has nothing to do with it. Time doesn't care. But the unjust thing about our story, Brilka, is that neither you nor I are given the possibility of remembering everything, and all those who have been forgotten; that I too -- on your behalf -- have to choose, to decide what is important to relate and what is not, a task that sometimes seems to me impossible" (pp. 521-2).

That pretty much sums up all historical endeavour, I would say.





The third theme, also history-related, is the limited ability of the individual to swim against the overwhelming river that constitutes our particular historical -- ideological, economic, and social -- times. In this novel we watch people choosing sides, only to be forced to manoeuvre again when the world revolves, the streams shift,  and they suddenly find themselves on the wrong side. White or red, fascist or anti-fascist, communist or dissident, nationalist or pragmatist -- history stirs you around like a mixer making marble cake. 







Fourthly, the book makes history personal by emphasizing the ways our lives are intimately interconnected with those of generations gone by. Truly, we are born already carrying a thousand stories... Yes, we can make choices; we are not utterly powerless; we have agency. But we are far from blank slates when we arrive. Our genes link us to the past, as do the life experiences of those who nurture, educate, and surround us, themselves at least partially conditioned by their era and circumstances.

Even with a Niza to educate her, we wonder quite how free Brilka will be to write her own life on the empty pages set aside for her.