Contemporary Georgian Fiction

I bought this book mostly as a learning tool. I have been learning Georgian on my own since early January 2012 and so far, in the textbooks I've used, the literary samples always come from the late XIX and early XX centuries. Therefore, I warmly welcomed the publishing of this Contemporary Georgian Fiction. Having access to the original texts in Georgian, I can therefore use this book as a confident source of bilingual reading in Georgian. Language learning aside, the stories present us with the post-soviet Georgia, and this alone would represent a remarkable effort. The selected stories consist of living, up-to-date literature that definitely helps take Georgia outside of the shade of the ex-USSR and present it as a culturally rich country of the XXI century.

This fills a void for English-speakers interested in Georgia. The benefit of reading this kind of fiction is that you get snapshots of daily life and insights into culture and attitudes that you wouldn't necessarily get from history books, which often focus on leadership rather than ordinary people. I hope Elizabeth Heighway and others continue this great translation work and bring more Georgian writers to the rest of the world.

The 21 short stories here are mostly very enjoyable. In my opinion, about half are good and several are truly excellent, deserving world exposure, notably the opening story by Mariam Bekauri, which is a poignant and sparse tale about a crippled girl and her brother.The stories give a sense of the place from whence modern Georgian has emerged, ie the Soviet era and the civil war which followed - a place of harsh poverty, haphazard repression and shining individuals. There is relatively little about the outward-going optimism and wide-boy culture of the present time.