This is a modern epic that weaves over a hundred years of Georgian history through the tale of six generations of a family. The novel unfolds as a series of eight overlapping family biographies, as told by Niza to her adolescent niece, Brilka. “Carpets are woven from stories. So we have to preserve and take care of them. Even if this one has spent years packed away somewhere for moths to feast on, it must now come to life again and tell us its stories. I’m sure we’re woven in there, too, even if we never suspected it.” The family comes from the poor Georgian nobility, who managed to maintain an aura of respectability even as the winds of fortune changed in their homeland. “And so for me, my life begins right there, in the year 1900, in that bitterly cold winter when Stasia came into the world. I was born then, too, just as you were, Brilka. My childhood didn’t start in 1974 — no, it began much earlier, it reaches much deeper. My childhood, when I thought myself free and happy, because I was so sure of Stasia’s love, is these stories. Where they begin, I begin. All these places, towns, houses, people — they are all part of my childhood. The Revolution as much as the War, the dead as much as the living. All these people, lives, places burned themselves so firmly into my brain, they were so present there, that I began to live with them. I still needed Stasia if I wanted to wander around in these times, to pass through them, dive into them. But soon, I hoped, I would be capable of telling the stories myself, telling them anew, completing them.”
The paterfamilias was a chocolatier who learned his secrets in Budapest before the Great War. “Like all members of the Georgian elite, my great-great-grandfather was afraid of the proletariat. He was happy to make charitable donations to them, but he still liked to keep them at arm’s length whenever possible.” By the time of Niza’s grandfather, Kostya, the family had become safely integrated into the Communist system that ruled their homeland from Moscow. Kostya had distinguished himself in the navy during the siege of Leningrad, before joining the dreaded Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD. Like so many other survivors of the war years, though, it was like he was walking through the rest of his life partially dead. “Kostya Jashi understood what it was to lose. He had lost. He was fatally wounded, but his death throes would last a lifetime. For this war was not a war against enemies; it was a war he had waged against the people he loved.” There is an air of melancholy and deep heartbreak that is thick throughout the entire novel. “I owe these lines to a century that cheated and deceived everyone, all those who hoped. I owe these lines to an enduring betrayal that settled over my family like a curse. I owe these lines to my sister, whom I could never forgive for flying away that night without wings; to my grandfather, whose heart my sister tore out; to my great-grandmother, who danced a pas de deux with me at the age of eighty-three; to my mother, who went off in search of God … I owe these lines to Miro, who infected me with love as if it were poison, I owe these lines to my father, whom I never really got to know; I owe these lines to a chocolate-maker and a White-Red Lieutenant; to a prison cell; to an operating table in the middle of a classroom; to a book I would not have written if…” As Niza recounts her family’s stories she must come to terms with the fact that all of her relatives had their own distinct notions of their own history. “There were countless versions of the truth, and as soon as you put them in your mouth they distorted themselves, crumbled like stale bread, leaving only an insipid taste on the tongue.”
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