The Eighth Life by Nino HaratischwiliMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
(This isn’t a traditional book review. It’s more of a beginner novelist’s reactions to and lessons taken from the novel rather than an overview of what happens in it. Though there’s a bit of the latter too.)
When people hear that I’m writing a book set during the Russian Revolution, several recommend I read the book, The Eighth Life (for Brilka), by Nino Haratischvili. Originally written in German, set mostly in Georgia during Russian and then Soviet rule, the English edition was released in 2020, just in time for Covid long-reads. I’d downloaded it to my phone and had no idea that the full novel runs to nearly 1,000 printed pages! The English edition was shortlisted for a Booker Prize, and, despite its length (or perhaps partially because of it), became an international bestseller. In The Eighth Life, we learn about the history of Georgia through the saga of six generations of the Jashi family. Like Georgia itself, their fortunes rise and fall, family members struggle and flail, careers and governments succeed and fail. Narrator Niza Jashi, the great-great-granddaughter of the first Jashi in the novel, is writing the family story for her troubled niece, Brilka, a 12-year-old who has just run away from her dance troupe while they were on tour in the Netherlands.
If you like interesting, character-driven sagas, this book is for you. There are many twists and turns in the plot, but it isn’t about plot per se: what makes the plot so interesting is how each event affects the individuals and the relationships within the family. What fascinated me was how all the characters are such vivid mixtures of good and bad behaviour. In other words, they feel like real, messy, fallible humans. In an interview, author Nino Haratischvili commented on how much she had enjoyed the challenge of writing the character who is, arguably, the worst-behaved member of the family, Kostya Jashi. Many of the things he does in the book feel downright evil and have horrible, life-long consequences. And yet, as Haratischvili pointed out, he did most of them because he truly believed he was doing what was best for the family and even for the individuals involved. He was not an evil person. As angry as I got with him, it was true that, for example, sending his sister into exile probably saved her life. (Or at least, did so for many years. The emotional toll of that decision made it less clearly the correct one in the long run.)
Looking at the book from a novelist’s perspective, there were times when I felt it relied too heavily on “telling”, but given all the decades and lives it covered, it would have run another thousand pages or more had the author not resorted to summary. Despite those sections, which sometimes got a bit tiresome, most of the book was gripping.
Other aspects of Haratischvili’s writing gave me ideas for how I can improve my own book, which is now in the editing stage. For instance, I have a scene where two characters who have just been traumatized by witnessing a riot console each other with sex. I didn’t want to make it particularly explicit but glossing it over didn’t work either. In movies I often get annoyed when characters resort to consolation or distraction sex. It never made sense to me, until I read this paragraph, in which we see the character’s brain struggling to block out the trauma, desperately seeking comfort:
“I clung to him, my heart racing. As my hands explored his belly, touched his nipples, brushed his Adam’s apple, I could see the soldier swinging his spade, the body of the young man falling to the ground. I could see Christine’s chemical burns as Miros smelled my skin and kissed my breasts, as he lifted me up and laid me on top of him, all the while looking at me and brushing my unruly, wet hair out of my face. And I thought I was back in the dark, empty corridor in my school, hearing the screams of the people outside, trampling each other and calling for help. I clung to him, as if his body could undo these images, these sounds. If I just held on tight enough, if I loved him fiercely enough, if I dug my knees into the mattress, put my hands on his chest to support myself, if I took him inside me, could I offer him a refuge, even though I hadn’t managed to take Christine and all those other people into my hiding place?”
The writing (and the wonderfully done translation by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin) is often luminous. For example:
• A train compartment that “stank of beer and loneliness.”
• A description of a woman: “her biological age was masked by a thick layer of makeup.”
• During a time of revolution: “the sky lacked lustre and took on the colour of a chameleon. The willow on the riverbank bent lower and caressed the earth to comfort it: worse was to come and Nature had to arm itself.”
• During another violent period: “The trees came to a whispered agreement, and hanged themselves on one another’s branches.”
The book isn’t all doom and gloom, though, and nor is the writing. Some of my favourite lines:
• “stars were sprinkled across the sky like tiny freckles”
• “their bejewelled wives sparkled like Christmas trees and spoke to us children as if we had been lobotomized or were forever two years old.”
• “In this country people need a lie-in before they start a revolution. We don’t do demonstrations or coups without a good night’s sleep.”
I kept thinking, as I read, that The Eighth Life would make a fantastic TV series. I was clearly not alone in that thought: there’s one in production. In the meantime, if you’ve got the time, I’d urge you to read the book. On-screen you won’t get to enjoy all those marvellous descriptions and word choices.
My rating: 4.5 stars. I docked it half a star because there were times when I felt the history, while important, intruded too much, needlessly slowing down the story. It’s a difficult balance when you want your readers to understand complex historical times. I worry that I may have gone too far to the other extreme in the current draft of my novel. Only time (and editors, and readers) will tell.
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