There’s something so satisfying about getting immersed in a big family saga. At over 930 pages, “The Eighth Life” may look intimidating from the outside and I had a few false starts reading this novel but as soon as I got caught up in the many stories it contains I stopped noticing what page number I was on. The novel recounts the tales of multiple generations of a family in the country of Georgia over the 20th century following them through the Russian Revolution, Soviet rule and civil war. Ever since reading the novel “Soviet Milk” and finding out more about the Latvian strand of my family history I’ve been interested in the effects the Soviet Union had upon Eastern European countries. Haratischvili’s novel gives a wide-scale perspective on this time period and region paying special attention to the negative effect these political changes had on the lives of a variety of women. Comparisons have been made to “War and Peace” and “The Tin Drum” but, from my own frame of reference, I'd liken it more to “Gone with the Wind” crossed with “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
The novel does an impressive job at balancing an overview of large-scale political and social changes over the past century alongside recounting the personal fortunes and failures of a particular family. Starting as a family of confectioners whose speciality is an irresistible secret recipe for hot chocolate, the descendants become involved in all levels of society from a commander in Trotsky's Red Army to the mistress of a fearsome leader to a defector fighting for Georgian independence to a singer that becomes a symbol of political resistance. At the heart of the book is Stasia who possesses superstitious beliefs about the cursed nature of the family's chocolate recipe and believes she can see the ghosts of dead relatives. The novel is truly epic in showing how family stories are built upon the tales of past generations and shows that radical transitions in society result in innumerable tales of personal strife.
A great pleasure that comes from reading a long novel like this is seeing how characters will change and reemerge over many years. A character that appears only briefly as a girl trapped in a perilous situation appears many pages later as an old woman who has achieved great success. We also follow the evolution of certain characters who may begin with certain personalities and values but who, in response to political events and personal strife, find themselves irreparably altered in their convictions and outlook. I felt like I truly lived alongside many of these characters who undergo so many changes over the years. But it also takes on a great poignancy following the subsequent generations who may repeat certain patterns of their ancestors' behaviour or might wildly rebel against what was expected of them.
There's a difficulty in the way political discourse and the history books have set up this dichotomy of East (Soviet Communism) vs West (Democracy) and how this shaped the way the populations of these geographical regions relate to and conceptualize one another. Of course it was a real ideological battle that brought us to the brink of nuclear war. But I also feel like this has set up an oppositional mentality which produces a lot of stereotypes and barriers. For instance, when Kitty leaves Georgia and eventually settles in England to become a successful singer the media and general public want her to be a victim of the Soviet Union: “She allowed customers to engage her in conversation, and played the part of the Soviet sensation to the hilt. She played up to people’s fears and projections, and accentuated them with more horrific details.” While she did suffer terribly under Soviet rule and while the Soviet Union's practices were horrific, I feel like the West often demonizes the entire region and its people. So it's enriching how this novel humanizes a family caught up in this time period, showing how they have to make difficult choices and choose certain allegiances in order to survive.
A way this novel spoke to me is in its portrayal of Kitty, a woman who leaves her homeland to settle in England. She makes a successful career there but feels a strong longing for her place of birth and family yet she can't return for political reasons. In reflecting about her mentality the narrator states: “Perhaps the most tragic thing about exile, both mental and geographical, was that you began to see through everything, you could no longer beautify anything; you had to accept yourself for who you were. Neither who you had been in the past, nor the idea of who you might be in the future, mattered.” This made me think about displacement as a radical confrontation with oneself. Although I'm much more privileged and fortunate than Kitty I can relate to her as someone who has spent a long period of my adult life away from my homeland. And I think at the moment, in this state of global lockdown where we are in a sense exiles within our own homes, many of us are forced to confront ourselves and what matters to us in a way we didn't have to when we were caught in the busyness of daily life.
I had the great pleasure of sitting down for a cup of hot chocolate with author Nino Haratischvili and translators Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin for a live discussion about their tremendous novel.
A common criticism I've seen made about this novel is that there's not much differentiation between characters later on in the novel, especially between the men who are often portrayed as villainous. Personally, I didn't feel this way except perhaps about the characters of Miqa and Miro who did feel very similar to me. And, though there are several male characters who act in a horrendous way, there are many prominent men from this period of history whose actions resulted in the torture and death of many people so the novel is merely reflecting that fact. I could also cite many men in the novel such as David or Severin who are more positive characters. Also, one of the many interesting things which emerged from speaking from the author is that she didn't see the character of Kostya as simply a villain despite the many terrible things he does. All the characters have strengths as well as flaws which makes them more fully rounded. But I think it's also right that the novel focuses more on female characters as these women’s stories haven't been as frequently documented in history books.
It feels like a cliché to say that a novel contains a lot of heartache but ultimately has a hopeful message. But that's exactly what “The Eighth Life” does in its construct because the entire novel is narrated from the point of view of a descendant named Niza who recounts these many varied and dramatic stories of their family for her adolescent niece Daria. In honouring these lives from the past she both informs and makes space for the next generation. It's a way of reckoning with the tragedies of the past century and paving a way for the future through the ingenuity and resilience of the family who survives and can carry on that legacy. The novel poignantly demonstrates how what's to come hasn't been written yet.
