THE LACK OF LIGHT

A brilliant epic follows four Georgian friends through the tragedies of their country and the challenges of their lives.

Haratischwili’s masterful novel unfolds over two alternating timelines—one, a single night at a photography retrospective in Brussels in 2019, brings three long-separated friends together; the other ranges through the decades that define their friendship, beginning in the late 1980s in a shared apartment courtyard in Tbilisi, Georgia, a few years before the fall of the Soviet Union, continuing as the former Soviet Republic tumbles into criminality, mob rule, and the threat of civil war. The exhibition celebrates the work of their fourth friend, Dina, who died by suicide 20 years earlier—a fact we learn in the first chapter but come to fully understand only 700 eagerly turned pages later. The narrator is Keto, who grows up in a delightfully quirky household with two battling grandmothers, a widowed physicist father, and a beloved older brother; the story follows her friendships with brilliant Ira, daring Dina, and beautiful Nene, the darling daughter of a mobster family, from their schoolyard beginnings, through young loves, emerging talents, and life-changing decisions, everything thrown into high relief by the unfolding disaster around them. Ferrante lovers will find many echoes of the Neapolitan novels here, the plot similarly featuring almost mythic levels of intensity in love and grief, centering the importance of women’s friendship. An unexpectedly moving translators’ note says that the novel, while not autobiographical, is probably Haratischwili’s "most personal work to date," a history strongly felt in myriad gorgeously written summary passages like this one: “We, the children of the nineties, who swapped our childhood and youth for Kalashnikovs and heroin—we, of all people, listened to Barry White and longed for nothing more than eternal love and the ecstatic fruits of that love, for fun and excitement. We, of all people, let the music play. And how! We played it right to the bitter end.”

A thrilling, heartbreaking, unforgettable story. Not a page too long.