‘The Eighth Life’ by Nino Haratischvili: Georgia for Western consumption

The stereotypical image of Georgia is limited to wine, the hospitality of its people and picturesque mountains. And, for a Western audience, quite often the idea of ​​Georgian history and culture is a product of the Russian narrative. Georgian-German author Nino Haratischvili sets out to shatter these misconceptions in her family saga “The Eighth Life.”

It all begins in 1900. Jashi, a Georgian confectioner, brings home a secret recipe for hot chocolate that promises to make him rich. The confectioner is the father of a beautiful family, and the future outlook looks unburdened and full of opportunity. Even when his daughter Stasia leaves for agony-stricken St. Petersburg in search of her beloved husband, reality will not tarnish this story with its dirty hands. But the chocolate turns out to be a curse, and the sweet tone of the first part of the saga is but a lure.

Sweet lure

The family hot chocolate recipe is a well-kept secret in the Jashi household. In fact, it has the effect of a genuine antidepressant, but at the same time, every cup of chocolate brings misery. With this chocolate, Stasia’s father encouraged his wife to conceive a second child (he wanted to have a son). With this chocolate, Stasia helped a family member overcome her severe apathy in revolutionary St. Petersburg at the dawn of the 20th century. This chocolate opium emerges throughout the novel at the most difficult moments.

It is ironic that the characters in this saga chase away the wounds of communist terror with sweet Viennese chocolate – and that some of them are attracted to Vienna like a magnet. They are drawn to the sweet aroma of this Western city, and because of their dream they endure some of life’s worst sufferings.

Georgia for Westerners

As is often the case with modern family sagas, “The Eighth Life” is neither written in the language nor does it take place in the country it represents. Nor is the novel’s target audience native Georgians, who may find in the folds of this massive novel discrepancies with regard to their own family memories. The orientation of the text toward a Western audience is typical in modern prose. One need only look at the body of North American literature, which tells stories of different cultures from around the world but gears them toward Western, English-speaking readers.

Since this is not a story intended for a domestic readership, the book provides the most simplified explanations of historical contexts. It also includes markers of Western chronology that differ from Soviet chronology. Important cultural and historical events of the West act as a sort of calendar that is completely out of sync with the Soviet historical framework, underscoring the difference between the Soviet world and the Western one. And there are many such differences.

For a Western audience, “The Eighth Life” is a long exotic fairy tale with beautiful Georgian princesses for whom party leadership will do whatever it is they ask. With its heinous KGB employee who ordered that the uterus of one of the novel’s heroines be cut out. With incredible assistants who were able to pull a person from behind the Iron Curtain and out into the world. This is an epic tale about the horrors of the Soviet Union – in other words, something that existed in real life but always at a safe distance. This distance allows for empathy and genuine concern, yet at the same time, it emphasizes the enormous disparities in how people lived in different parts of 20th century Europe.

But in the Ukrainian context, this great Georgian novel strikes a different chord.

Touching each other’s scars

“The Eighth Life” features a number of female characters who have withstood terrible traumas and are drawn to other women who have suffered other ordeals.

Kitty, who was tortured at the hands of the KGB, tells her story to her Aunt Christine in exchange for a chance to touch her disfigured face, which her aunt keeps carefully hidden from the world. In this way, the two women are able to touch one another’s scars, though, unlike Christine’s, Kitty’s scar is not visible to the naked eye. Similarly, later and far from home, Kitty bonds with a woman who has been through a concentration camp.

For the characters of the novel, trauma becomes something that cannot be put into words. Kitty writes popular songs based on her experiences, which are impossible for outside listeners to fully comprehend. It is as if the girl cares not so much for words, but about the spaces between these words. Thus, trauma in this book appears as the language of the mute, who communicate not with words, but with what cannot be described in the pauses between words.

As a result, for Ukrainians, Haratischvili’s novel reads differently than it does for a Western audience. We are witnesses to a similar historical experience as the characters of “The Eighth Life.” We understand not only the words of Haratischvili’s novel but also the pauses between these words. We can fill and supplement the pages of this book with fragments of our own family stories and our own literature, turning these 1,000 pages into a sort of “Arabian Nights.”

The countries that happened to be part of the Russian/Soviet empire share an overabundance of experience, the surface of which has not even begun to be scratched. In the Ukrainian cultural context, “The Eighth Life” resonates like a very familiar vinyl record. The kind you’ve heard ever since you were a child but just didn’t know the name. For example, the way Andro Eristavi dreams about Vienna rings true to all Ukrainians – we immediately understand that it’s not so much about the city and its vibes but rather the very freedom that the West symbolizes.

Western blindness

In Tony Judt’s memoir, “The Memory Chalet,” there is an episode in which the author surprisingly remarks that they, the young Western intellectuals who romanticized revolution and resistance, managed to overlook both the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968. This episode echoes and harmoniously complements “The Eighth Life.” When Kitty manages to escape from the Soviet Union to London, it is as if she passes from perpetual imprisonment into a completely different world. It is at this point that the novel changes, becoming penetrated by the Western world and the way Westerners view Eastern Europe.

For example, this part of the novel discusses homosexual relationships, which call for a certain resistance vis-à-vis the system and a struggle for the freedom to be oneself. But this is a completely different process than the struggle of Kitty and the novel’s other post-Soviet heroes for the opportunity to simply be.

At one point in the novel, anxiously waiting to meet her mother, Kitty finds herself in a crowd in Prague, where she sings some of her own songs and is portrayed by the Western media as an icon of resistance. Everyone wants to hear her story. But Kitty’s real story was not what Western audiences craved because Kitty did not fit the role of the quintessential rebel. The Soviet Union (with the Gulag as its symbol) was more like a concentration camp. This is not something that one rebels against but rather escapes from. So it is not surprising that Kitty is drawn to the red-haired Fred, a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp. The sexuality between them is not erotic but, rather, thanatological in nature and haunted by the losses of loved ones.

Tony Judt was right: Western intellectuals have managed (and still manage) to overlook the most important developme  in Eastern Europe.

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Translation: David Soares

Copy editing: Jayson MacLean