The eighth life, by Nino Haratischwili

«Magical as One Hundred Years of Solitude, intense like The House of the Spirits, monumental like Ana Karenina«

A novel that is capable of summarizing aspects of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Tolstoy, points to the universal of the letters. And the truth is that to achieve that excellence the novel already starts from more than a thousand pages. Of course, it cannot be easy to synthesize in a single novel so much inspirational reference of the first order.

The question is to elucidate if the bombastic presentation finally corresponds to the work of this young German writer ...

Nothing better than doing a sincere exercise in introspection to try to tell a story with grounds. The author's own Georgian origins serve to locate a kind of remote temporal thread where everything can be justified, even a century later. Between the genetic load, the guilt and the transmission of pieces of soul from one generation to another we find the narrative sustenance. Because we are mostly made up of water in the organic and by the past in everything else. So when we find a novel that explains the reasons for being a person, we end up connecting with our own reasons.

And perhaps that is why this novel is compared with some others in the history of more universal literature in terms of the different manifestations of realism, from the most down to earth to the most magical enduringly associated with Gabo.

We traveled from Georgia in 1917, before it was eaten up by the Soviet Union. There we meet Stasia, a woman with broken dreams and loves broken by the revolution that would end in the Republic.

And then we went to 2006 to meet Nice, a descendant of that dreamy Stasia faced with her destiny. The interim between the lives of Stasia and Nice is seen as a scene full of exciting intra-stories, mysteries and guilt.

There is always a trigger that ends up connecting the unfinished business of a family. Because it is essential to build personal history in order to move forward without burden. That trigger ends up being Nice's niece, a rebellious girl named Brilka who decides to escape her suffocating life to get lost in any other place in Europe that sounds like modernity, opportunities and a change of life.

Thanks to this search for Brilka that completely involves Nice, we enter into that vital recomposition in the shadow of the spirits of yesterday. A tragicomedy that certainly brings that blinding glow of the most classic Russian realism with the emotionality of other literary perspectives soaked in reality only bathed on the shores of other literary latitudes.

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