Vardiashvili, who also left Tbilisi for London as a child, is understandably attempting a complicated reclamation of his birthplace, but this reclamation skews romantic through the overuse of aphorism. “Funny how the thing you once loved so much can become what you fear the most,” he writes. There is also an uneasy balance between poetry and prose, which shades the sentences purple. Shadows are “liquid gloom,” a smile “retreats into a frown,” an idyllic sky is “too blue,” a mountain range’s snowcaps are “too white” and blood is let in “juicy pulses.”
But when the story is propelled by political cynicism, by cigarettes and vodka, one can see streaks of Emmanuel Carrère and Jean-Patrick Manchette in the writing. Cunning and unstinting, humanist and self-aware, Vardiashvili nears noir excellence. Even more exquisite are the descriptions of Tbilisi, written as though the author was long at sea and is now desperately grasping for connection. He writes: “As we entered the city of Tbilisi, I began to recognize things — a crumbling street corner, or a building, or a peculiar twist of the road. At the same time, I didn’t recognize a damn thing. The way your teeth feel after the dentist leaves you with unfamiliar edges to snag your tongue on.”
Vardiashvili places his city, his country, on a corroding bluff, which its people are holding together with baling wire and duct tape. An old woman’s wooden balcony doubles as a makeshift kitchen, her water comes from a copper pipe in the ground, and her cheese is covered in newspaper ink, yet, within seconds, she is furnishing Saba with a meal.
The most memorable passages in “Hard by a Great Forest” evoke a thorough understanding of war, escape and violence; in one, old gravestones have been effaced of their names by the rain. In these moments, this novel becomes a palimpsest, reflecting the cyclical nature of familial death and individual reconstitution. The unstable way we return home.
HARD BY A GREAT FOREST | By Leo Vardiashvili | Riverhead | 340 pp. | $29
