The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili is Epicly Exhausting

“Despite my years of struggling both for and with this country, I have not managed to replace it, to drive it out of me like an evil spirit that beset me. No ritual purification, no repression mechanism has yet been of any assistance. Because everywhere I went, travelling further and further from my country, I was searching for the squandered, scattered, wasted, unused love I’d left behind” (10)

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili is first and foremost a labor of love: that is, it is about love and it is a labor to read. Second, it is a work of Georgian history, written in German and longlisted for the International Booker prize in 2020 for its translation by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin. Third, it is a entry in the loose subgenre of family sagas that represents the history of a nation with a handful of quirky and tragic individuals. Each of these identities—romantic, national and literary—contributes to the character of the 930-page tome. But none is sufficient to save it from its own weight.

Haratischvili shares a background with her narrator, a Georgian woman living in Germany. But The Eighth Life is not about the migrant experience. It is a chronicle of the Red Century in Georgia, from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian war, through the eyes of a well-off Georigan family. National identity is a point of pride for some characters, but also a source of shame: Soviet tyrants Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, nicknamed “the Generalissiumus” and “the Little Big Man,” learned cruelty in “the most beautiful place on earth” (7).

As you might expect, this book is dark and filled with rape, torture and other tragedies. This is the 20th century, after all; no one comes through unscathed. What makes The Eighth Life stand out from other multigenerational epics—Middlesex, Midnight’s Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pachinko come to mind—is its tough-as-nails women. From the wrinkled Stasia to the apathetic Niza, each heiress of the prominent Jashi family learns to weather her particular challenges with courage and delicious, possibly-cursed hot chocolate.

The reader is not so fortunate.

The Eighth Life induces in its readers a disillusionment akin to the failure of Communism itself. The first pages of are full of hope, and the middle has a snappy and dramatic plot with a clearly-defined enemy. I particularly enjoyed learning about the character of Giorgi Alania, a family friend with a mysterious past. But as the ninth or tenth sex scene popped up like a toxic mushroom, I realized there was no way the ending could possibly be satisfying. By the 1990s, I felt as drained as a postcommunist pension.

But despite the exhausting tone that persists in many chapters, certain parts of this novel are a joy to read. Each chapter begins with a quote from history, with sources ranging from William Shakespeare to Anna Akhmatova to the slogans on propaganda posters. The translations of these quotes were quite beautiful and often sharper than the prose that followed them. There is also a lovely passage where Niza, the narrator, recounts her childhood experience of communism:

“For Daria and me, the Soviet Union meant: constant funeral marches and processions as aged gentlemen of the Communist Party were carried to their graves; carnations everywhere, macabre spectacles broadcast on all the television channels. For us, the Soviet Union meant: endless summer camps, Pioneer neckerchiefs. Tea plantations, apiaries, and kolkoɀes. White knee-socks from China, tapestries of hunting scenes on the walls, Mishka Na Severe chocolates, and Lagidze’s tarragon lemonade. Our grandfather’s GAZ-13, the brightly coloured blocks of Plasticine with the frog on them, yellow 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 odorless brown bath-soap that was actually called ‘Bath Soap’” (631)

It’s absolutely fabulous: even the most ambitious and idealistic communist regime is remembered as a deluge of stuff! That passage and the next few pages are grounds for the Booker International, were they not surrounded by 900 pages of extrania.

If you are looking for a challenge and a history lesson, this might be the book for you. The Eighth Life, hailed as “The Georgian War and Peace,” promises everything. But sometimes everything is a bit too much.

“Live through all wars. Cross all borders. To you I dedicate all gods and all rosaries, all burnings, all decapitated hopes, all stories. Break through them. Because you have the means to do it, Brilka. The eight—remember it. All of us will always be interwoven in this number and will always be able to listen to each other, down through the centuries” (6)