Like history for chocolate: bestseller hits the sweep spot

Fiction
The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
By Nino Haratischvili; trans., Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Scribe, $35

At close to 1000 pages, spanning the 20th century and all the major political events in Georgia from the Bolshevik to the Rose Revolution, The Eighth Life (For Brilka) is an ambitious novel from Georgian author and playwright Nino Haratischvili.

It was a bestseller in Germany, Holland, Poland and Georgia before being translated into English. Broken into eight sections, the book explores the tumultuous rise and fall of the Soviet Union and communism in Georgia through the lives of eight members of the same family over several generations.

The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin hailed from Georgia and casts a significant shadow on the story in Nino Haratischvili's book.Credit: AP

The book is narrated by Niza, who was born in 1974 and is retelling the family lore to her niece Brilka, born after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Niza begins her story for Brilka with her great-great-grandfather, a chocolate maker in Tblisi at the turn of the 20th century. Is Georgia – like Switzerland or Belgium – famous for chocolate? No, but her great-great-grandfather learnt his craft in Budapest and Vienna.

‘‘Could he have discovered something that was too good for mankind?’’ Niza ponders. The chocolate could be a metaphor for communism – palatable in small doses but dangerous undiluted. As the chocolate maker tells his daughter Stasia: ‘‘it can bring about calamity.’’

Stasia marries a lieutenant with the (anti-Communist) White Guard, Simon Jashi, who admires her dancing and accompanies her horseback riding on the steppe. But he departs for Petrograd as soon as they are wed, where he joins the Red Army.

Nino Haratischvili.Credit:

Georgia, a small country with mountains and a rocky coastline bordered by the Black Sea, went from being part of the Russian Empire during the 19th century to being briefly independent after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Independence was short-lived, for Georgia was invaded by the Bolsheviks and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921.

Readers might recognise characters from Georgian history woven through this narrative, from Little Big Man (Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the NKVD) to the Generalissimus (Stalin himself). Again and again, the Jashi family crosses paths with historical figures and takes part in the wars, protests and revolutions.

There is a fairytale quality to the first half of The Eighth Life, a vast distance between the narrator and the stories she is retelling. Characters are largely one-dimensional, explained in long passages of exposition. They resemble small figurines the narrator is moving about on a play stage, with sweeping generalisations and very little concrete detail. Describing the first kiss between Stasia and Simon Jashi, Niza narrates, ‘‘Of course, the first kiss was wonderful – I’m sure it was, very sure, Brilka: the first kiss of our story has to be wonderful.’’

Continuing the fairytale motif, the women are ‘‘supernaturally’’ beautiful, ‘‘enthralled’’ by their loves, Old Russia is ‘‘lovely and glittering’’ and during the German approach on Stalingrad during World War II, ‘‘Roses no longer bloomed in any colour but black’’. Women don’t dress but ‘‘swathe’’ themselves in silk, and stairs are not descended but ‘‘floated down’’.

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This all comes back to Haratischvili’s choice of narrator. Niza requires this vagueness when speaking of the past, for how can she know these things except in generalisations and embellishments, from oft-told stories? Her own nostalgia means these stories of the past are suffused with romantic excess.

The story gains momentum through World War II, when almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army, and afterwards the student protests against Khrushchev. Tension in the family escalates as Kostya, Niza’s grandfather, climbs the rungs of the Soviet military, while his sister and his daughter are more compelled by Georgian nationalism. Kostya is loyal to Leningrad, while his sister Kitty, in a Wuthering Heights twist, takes up with her adopted brother Andro – who joins the Georgian Legion.

As communism falters towards the final third of the novel the pace escalates, and the narrative distance begins to narrow. Niza becomes detailed in her descriptions, down to the contents of a Soviet bathroom cabinet: ‘‘Krya-Krya children’s shampoo, Grandfather’s Start shaving cream, the talcum powder in the bathroom cabinet with the cat’s head on the pot, which we weren’t allowed to use. Hygiene body lotion, and Stasia’s Red Moscow perfume, which smelled of old people and was enough to give you a headache.’’

The backdrop of this saga’s climax is the fall of communism, the ensuing corruption and alienation of the government from the people of Georgia, the secessionist wars in Abkhazia, the economic crisis and nostalgia for the USSR. This is where Haratischvili hits her stride: the characters become more complex and the tensions less operatic.

The chocolate could be a metaphor for communism – palatable in small doses but dangerous undiluted.

Haratischvili explores a fascinating and turbulent period of Georgian history that has received little attention, but there are so many competing elements to The Eighth Life that dilute the story. Interspersed with the events of the past 100 years of Georgian history are magical realism, secret recipes and ghosts in the garden.

It takes almost 1000 pages to meet the character Brilka who the narrator is addressing, and when we do there is no revelation. The secret chocolate – like communism – fizzles out.

The Eighth Life will certainly sweep some readers away, but the story skims the surface of lived experience. Within vast swathes of history there is only a smattering of insight into how it felt to be there.
Eleanor Limprecht’s most recent novel, The Passengers, is published by Allen & Unwin at $29.99.