The latest addition to my website consists of two novels published in one volume. The first is Daur Nachkebia‘s Берег ночи (The Shore of Night). It is set during the Abkazia-Georgia conflict as well as before and after that conflict. The narrator is Beslan who fought in the conflict and he haas been given the notebook of Adgur, a former friend who died in the conflict, essentially by suicide. Beslan tells his story and quotes from Adgur’s notebook and gives a very depressing account of both his and Adgur’s life as well as showing both the horrors of war and the horrorrs of post-war Abkhazia. He has no job. His girlfriend goes to Moscow. He has abandoned his pre-war career in physics. Such sadness and hopelessness were so spread thickly, all around him like tar, that he wanted to shoot himself.
The second book is Guram Odisharia‘s პრეზიდენტის კატა (The President’s Cat). This is diametrically the opposite of The Shore of Night, telling the story of the very real Mikhail Bgazhba, first secretary of Abkhazia in the Soviet era. It consists of a series of anecdotes about the larger than lifeBgazhba who drinks Khrushchev under the table, hangs out with Castro and is prepared to massively exaggerate and lie to promote Abkhazia such as inventing an entire tea industry to impresss a visiting Japanese millionaire and giving a cat to an old lady whose son had been murdered, claiming it had belonged to President Kennedy. It is very funny and we cannot help but liking and admiring Bgazhba. The war does not come till the end of the book and it does affect him badly. Two fine books giving two very different impressions of this Central Asian region.