In Leo Vardiashvili’s first novel, “Hard by a Great Forest,” a young man begins a fraught quest in the country he once fled.
HARD BY A GREAT FOREST, by Leo Vardiashvili
“Hard by a Great Forest,” by Leo Vardiashvili, is a novel-as-postcard from a dissolute Georgia. Our narrator, the self-abnegating and guilt-ridden Saba, fled the former Soviet republic with his father and brother amid civil war, and arrived in 1990s London at the age of 8. Nearly two decades later, his father, Irakli, flies alone to Tbilisi to reconcile his past and goes missing. “I left a trail I can’t erase,” reads Irakli’s final message to his sons. “Do not follow it.” Naturally, Saba follows.
Clues to Irakli’s whereabouts are left by Saba’s dutiful and more erudite elder brother (who went to Georgia first and is now also missing), scrawled in graffiti across the city. The graffiti quotes prosaic cultural touchstones, lines from “Hansel and Gretel,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Wizard of Oz.” Bukowski makes an appearance. These bread crumbs turn up at opportune moments; some are unsubtle, and all are portentous.
Such contrivances abound in this first novel — both in plot and in language. “If the mountain doesn’t come to Mohammed …” is the opening of one too many rejoinders. “A guest is a gift from God,” the novel’s organizing sentiment, is repeated ad nauseam. True Georgians, we should know, are Georgians who take in strays.
Fortunately for Saba, one of these true Georgians, Nodar, appears early on; he is a taxi-driver-turned-Virgil who guides Saba through the country’s chaotic morass. Nodar is an earnest putz and good company, inventing or repeating local obscenities with brio: One Tbilisi police station is “a dog turd in a pigeon park.” He and the other true Georgians rise above the murky moralizing pall that hangs over the rest of the novel.
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.”
January 30, 2024 at 05:00PM
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Book Review: ‘Hard by a Great Forest,’ by Leo Vardiashvili - The New York Times
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