The Eighth Life, by Nino Haratischwili, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, Scribe, 2019
Sometimes I wonder how many people harbor a secret desire to write a book about their family’s entire history. I have certainly met enough women in my life who have expressed this explicitly, especially the stories shared by their mothers and grandmothers—the implication being that we don’t get enough of these stories in literature or biographies. It is perhaps for this reason that reading Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, feels so familiar, almost like a wish fulfilled. Because with all its exciting intricacies and the moving depth, The Eighth Life is not just the story of the trials and tribulations of one Georgian family over the red century; it is first and foremost a tribute that Niza, the book’s narrator, pays to her matriarchal line and to her family’s youngest member, her niece Brilka.
The Eighth Life has deservedly been compared to Tolstoy’s War & Peace, most recently translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Just like its epic predecessor, The Eighth Life features a dizzying amount of main and secondary characters whose lives are explored in depth and trailed over several decades, from the early 1900s to our present. The story starts with Niza’s great-grandmother, Stasia, the daughter of a famed Georgian chocolate-maker, who almost impetuously betroths Simon Jashi, a military man. Throughout the book, we follow Stasia, her sister Christina, and their granddaughters as they shape and are shaped by one hundred years of Georgian and USSR history. Like Tolstoy, Haratischwili is not afraid to go into the details of the major historical events that signpost the twentieth century, providing a guideline even for those that are not well versed in Soviet history. And just like Tolstoy, through the voice of her perceptive narrator, she is ready to remind us of the hypocrisy and absurd repetitions that history often entails.
But it’s also true that unlike Tolstoy, Haratischwili is less interested in outlining her own philosophy of history; her characters are never puppets used to make a larger point. Agency is clearly important to Haratischwili, which bears its own significance considering that most of her main characters are women. At just nineteen, sheltered, aristocratic Stasia defies paternal orders and leaves home to seek her lost husband in Saint Petersburg, a city that is completely foreign to her. Stasia’s sister, Christine, also rewrites history: just as Lavrentiy Beria was slated to follow Stalin as the head of the USSR, a role he had been preparing for all his life, Christine turns up at his house and makes him a mug of her father’s secret hot chocolate recipe. The catch: according to Stasia, the recipe is cursed, and anyone who drinks it is doomed for life. The day after Beria samples the most delightful of all hot chocolates, his meticulously planned future unravels. He is apprehended, accused of a number of crimes (for the most part true) and shot.
At the same time, Haratischwili is too astute a writer to imply that people have more power over history than history has over us. And her characters are not only shaped by history, they are also shaped by how others perceive and decide to tell their stories. One character embodies this point particularly well: Niza’s great-aunt, Kitty. Through a number of twists, Kitty becomes a renowned singer even in the West. And a picture of her, snapped as she was singing and playing her guitar during the Prague Spring of 1968 is then used to portray her and the act as a sign of resistance against Communist totalitarianism. Except that Kitty’s act of defiance was not against the USSR’s oppression, but an irrational reaction to having missed the chance of meeting someone dear to her while in Prague.
But her own feelings didn’t matter. Through a portion of Kitty’s history, Haratischwili also skewers Western perspectives on Eastern Europe and how many Western people looked at Kitty as a tool to fuel their imagination, not listening to her words (reluctant as she was to share her story) but building a Kitty that fit to their view of what life in the USSR had been like. Kitty’s manager, upon discovering her picture from Prague printed in the Guardian salivates at what that will mean for her sales and the picture does nothing to change her view of the Soviet Union, which “could be summarized as follows: ‘Dark. Grey. No clothes. Everyone in the same rubber boots. Cold. Slush. Cold again. Lots of old men. Bad music.’”
If the first half of The Eighth Life can read like a more traditional historical novel, once Elene, Niza’s mother, is born the pace changes. The story turns more introspective as Elene’s sense of identity becomes the victim of an eternal battle between her quarreling parents and she makes mistake after mistake in the hope that she will be able to hurt others as much as she is hurting. In Elene’s section, and her daughters’ after her, Haratischwili writes about women’s pain and anger in a way that is original in scope and yet echoes the themes of other contemporary female writers. A sense of pain that has the potential to erupt and change everything, except that language never feels enough to expose all the contradiction, resulting often in these women imploding instead of exploding. Maybe because of the book’s girth, or most probably because of Haratischwili’s talent as a writer, the transitions between the sections don’t feel harrowing. The stylistic progression is as natural as the passing of the years and the way characters’ taste in fashion and music begins to change with the times.
It is true that as I was reading The Eighth Life, I was reminded of this very human wish to resurrect the long-surrendered ghosts of our ancestors. But as I re-read certain passages, I realized that I had missed a motivation that is very clear in The Eighth Life’s and perhaps a bit more hidden with all of us who share this desire. During one moment in the narrative, as she does every so often, Niza addresses her niece Brilka directly, reminding her that all that family history “leads to that day”; every decision and misstep made by their ancestors led to that point, with Brilka’s unauthorized journey to Vienna in search of her past and Niza writing this story.
And this theme of a larger pattern and destiny recur throughout the book. “Sometimes, Brilka, stories repeat themselves, and overlap. Even life lacks imagination occasionally, and you can’t blame it for that, don’t you agree?” Niza asks her niece. And it’s true, throughout The Eighth Life girls get pregnant too young, the wrong people fall in love, granddaughters pursue their grandmother’s dreams, over and over. It’s no wonder that Niza uses a handwoven carpet as a metaphor to represent this history: each thread singularly important to the story, but in itself not enough to tell the larger pattern that arises from looking at the whole. In the same way that Niza is writing this story to exorcize the past, I kept wondering if perhaps part of the reason we are so invested in the stories of our ancestors is not so much to save them, but rather to save ourselves? We try to derive lessons from the past, but we are also in the pursuit of an eternal understanding of ourselves, of who we are and who we are meant to be. And in looking at the lives whose consequence we ultimately are we might just be provided with enough context to finally figure it out: what was all this for?
It might be easy to feel pessimistic about this way of looking at life, like all that we do and all that we are seem predestined from the very start from decisions that are not ours to make. But ultimately, regardless of the pain we often inherit, I think that The Eighth Life offers a more positive reading. It’s not about what others have made of us, but much more about the idea that while we cannot truly resurrect or correct the past, the present is still available. And while we may be entangled, as long as we are alive there will always be possibilities left to explore, perhaps someone left to save. As Niza tells Brilka in her introduction, “The women, the lieutenants, the daughters and sons are dead, and the legend, you, and I are alive. So we must try to make something of this.”
Barbara Halla is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote where she has covered Albanian and French literature and the Booker International Prize. She works as a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of contemporary and classic Albanian women writers. Barbara holds a BA in History from Harvard and has lived in Cambridge, Paris, and Tirana.
*****
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