When Keto comes home that winter day in early 1992, a stranger is sitting in the living room.

A girl, apparently one of her grandmothers' tutors, wrapped in a ski suit.

She is sitting on the top step of a ladder, because the residual heat in the room is concentrated in the upper layers of the air, and is reading a tattered book, lost in thought.

For Keto, the narrator in Nino Haratischwili's new novel "The Lack of Light", this becomes an enormously charged image: the girl sits there "like an adorable icon", the ladder acts through her "as if she were a golden throne in an enchanted one Rich”, and the verses in the book – Hölderlin, Keto imagines – create “possibly the only meaning, the only beauty” in the girl’s life.

Later, says Keto, she often regretted

not having at least sketched the moment with pen and drawing pad.

"And if I had done it then, I would have allowed myself a certain pathos and titled the picture 'Georgian Madonna without Child'."

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

An episode from the civil war, from one of several crises that overlapped and produced one another in Georgia in the 1990s: the bloody detachment of the state that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921 from the occupiers (who then took back around twenty percent of the country and have occupied it to this day hold), the rule and expulsion of the first President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the emerging gang crime of paramilitary groups, and finally the war with the breakaway province of Abkhazia and its Russian helpers, which ended in a catastrophic defeat for Georgia.

A reading girl

The novel focuses on four friends growing up in the Georgian capital during these years.

The very first scene, set in Tbilisi in 1987, shows the characteristics of the respective girls as well as the mechanisms of their unusually solid bond: the fourteen-year-olds, led by the fearless Dina, break into the city's botanical garden, followed by the romantic Nene and the clever Ira as did Keto, who had attached herself right to Dina's heels, the friend to a basin.

On a ledge, Dina and Keto hold hands.

Then they jump down into the water.

This is how Keto tells it, wordy, vivid, visually stunning, with sentences that like to leave the direct experience for inserted distanced observations or sometimes even sound like sentences.

It is a language that is clearly trying to master constant tension and to capture a confusing, often disturbing world by approaching it with cool observation and also using traditional patterns and figures, so that a girl reading can look back has advanced to become an icon that gives meaning.

Time is a surface

The reason for this is quickly made clear by the framework of the novel: in the summer of 2019, twenty years after Dina's death, Keto visited an exhibition in Brussels with his friend's photographic works that had become famous.

They show the unrest of those years, including the acts of war in Abkhazia, where Dina followed her journalist mentor as a press photographer, while the mentor himself died there.

And they keep showing the four friends, together or alone, even in extreme situations, with Dina not omitting herself.

The result is that at the vernissage, to which Nene and Ira also came, Keto is repeatedly approached by complete strangers who recognize her face and believe they know her because of the impressive photos.

At the same time, each of the photos is an opportunity for her to remember – the time it was taken in general, but also the specific moment in which the respective picture was taken.

From this the novel grows, which has a rough chronological order, which is at the same time interrupted by constant foreshadowings in Keto's story: The fact that Dina will kill herself shortly before the turn of the millennium is already mentioned in the first part of the novel, and also the bad outcome that most of the love stories and many of the resumes

in many cases we can anticipate it from the narrator's hints.

Some are murdered, others die from drugs, one disappears, one ends his days in a wheelchair, one flees insanity after a horrific experience.

And someone who climbed the mafia hierarchy without any visible damage is strutting through Tbilisi many years later with the insignia of a successful gangster.