Review | The Eighth Life — A Georgian saga that regrettably falls victim to Soviet stereotypes

3.5/5★

Nino Haratischwili’s critically acclaimed bestseller is an exciting and hopeful family saga, even if its narrow view leaves something to be desired.

It was September 2018 during Tbilisi’s International Festival of Theatre — the air held the heavy scent of expensive perfumes, women caressed their glistening pearls, and the crowd whispered and chuckled as the 5-hour play Red Century by Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre was performed. The main piece of decor on stage was a massive crimson carpet embroidered with Stalin’s head. The story was described as being about a faraway land, a kind of ‘second heaven’ for Russians — the story was about Georgia.

This was my first encounter with Germany-based Georgian writer Nino Haratischwili’s bestseller The Eighth Life, which was first published in German in 2014. The theatre adaptation reached the writer’s homeland before the Georgian translation of the book did.

‘You’re a thread, I’m a thread; together we make a little ornamentation, and together with lots of other threads we make a pattern. The threads are all different, differently thick or thin, dyed different colours. The patterns are hard to make out if you look at just one individual thread, but if you look at them together you start to see all sorts of amazing things’, the book’s narrator, Niza Jashi, tells her niece Brilka, a rebellious teenager who represents the modern generation of the Jashi dynasty.

Haratischwili’s 936-page novel is an attempt to unveil the ‘Red Century’ to the world through the story of the Jashi family, an upper-middle class family from western Georgia. Their struggles help the non-Georgian reader to ‘discover’ the truth about Georgia, which is often perceived as a Russian province even though we speak a different language, use our own alphabet, and have attempted (perhaps in vain) to distance ourselves from our former imperial rulers.

The Eighth Life is a real page-turner, heavy on love and hate, betrayal, loyalty, beauty, intrigue, rape, war, death, new life, power-hungry characters, ghosts of the past, and the aroma of magical hot chocolate mixed into moments of crisis using the secret recipe of the family patriarch, a master chocolatier and Niza’s great-great-grandfather. Over 100 years of forced togetherness, the six generations of the Jashi family experience all the major events that left their mark on the world order.

Set in Tbilisi, Moscow, London, and Berlin (and many other places around Europe where fate carries the characters), The Eighth Life covers all of the inflection points of Georgia’s modern history. Starting from the Russian Revolution, it features Stalin’s repressions and executions, World War II, the demolition of the Stalin’s cult, the Prague Spring (where Niza’s never seen grandmother sings the song of freedom and then becomes a dissident singer-songwriter in Britain), Perestroika, the 9 April 1989 Tbilisi massacre, and the crisis of the 1990s. This book is an almanac of stories that still haunt Georgia.

The Eighth Life is so full of characters that at some point, I decided to sketch a family tree to keep track. Some of the characters are vivid and memorable, like Stasia and her younger sister, the porcelain-skinned beauty Christine, who becomes the object of desire to the Big Little Man, a fictionalised portrayal of the powerful and cruel head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. Haratischwili’s Beria perfectly illustrates how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

While the beginning of the story is detailed and well-constructed, by the end it becomes more muted. The character's stories are mostly those of redemption, and the book has an underlying sense of hope, illustrated by the empty pages left for Brilka, who has yet to write her story.

The book was fluidly translated into English by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin in 2019 and went on to win literary acclaim, making it to the International Booker longlist in 2020. The acclaim is unsurprising, as The Eighth Life is a heart-stopping, exciting, and immersive family saga, the perfect mix of historical fiction and magical realism.

Despite this, at times the book feels as though it were written from a Western perspective. Although it shows the cruelty of the ‘Red Century’, the text does not look at it with a critical gaze, nor explain the reasons why some Georgians still long for Russia and a Stalin reborn.

The Eighth Life also shows only a narrow image of society, that of an upper-middle-class family successfully turned into members of the Soviet nomenclature, and says very little about those beyond this elite circle, who are represented only as stereotypically angry at the above-mentioned elite.

The book also reinforces some of the many stereotypes about Soviet-era Georgia, upholding the portrayal of Georgians as ever-singing, ever-dancing people of fun — a portrayal some Russians still seem to believe is true. By the end, the magical hot chocolate, which was not even relevant to the story and indeed was a part of this stereotypical representation, left a somewhat bitter aftertaste.

Book details: The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischwili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, 2020, Scribe Publications. Buy it from the publisher, from Amazon, or from any independent bookseller near you.

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