Everything came together in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, around an interior courtyard where we lived almost as a community: “the court was a state within a state”, “everyone had their place in this construction, and everyone knew their privileges perfectly”. Between Dina the curious and thirsty for freedom, Ira the reasonable, Nene the dreamer yet prudent, and Keto the shy, the observant, the loyal, the alchemy was real and intense. Managed by first love stories, by the gap between the promises of the future and the harsh reality, but also by betrayal, each person will have to find their own path in life. By being forced to leave childhood behind while seeing a previously close friendship become more and more disrupted. “We never hid anything from each other, we shared everything, proud to reveal to each other so generously our desires, our dreams and our hidden worries.”
gullIt was our time, we would have no other, we had to live our lives without an escape route.
The Soviet takeover, the democratic election of a president, the consequences of the dismantling of the USSR, the coup d’état: the changes are incessant in the lives of the quartet, and the forced renunciations are paid at a high price: “This is not the life we should have at our age!” “At the same time as we, the country, the people and the words were changing. The unsaid, the secrets, all the parts of our childhood that had been hidden from the State were revealed, as if the curtain had been pulled back. “
Ubiquitous family network
Motherless, living with an intellectual father locked in his bubble, two resourceful and endearing grandmothers as well as a brother who engages in illicit trafficking, Keto has, because she leads the story, a central place in the narration. In addition to telling the story of the bond with her friends, all caught up in an omnipresent family network, she reveals to us without disguise her helplessness, her demons, her impulses.
With a confident pen that leads the narrative with a bang, Nino Haratischwili (Tbilisi, 1983) constructs a tangle of relationships battered by trafficking, struggles for influence and power, and passions. Thirty years later, some wounds are still gaping. “We lived […] and we cannot be unfaithful to this life on the grounds that pain never completely disappears.”
“My mother is a news item”: a final act of love before committing suicide together
Epic breath, psychological richness, scholarly intrigue, political background: The flickering light offers us 700 dazzling pages, where the intimate story of four women takes on different colors, caught up in issues that go beyond them. “We can’t help but blame ourselves for still being alive while the world we came from is in ruins.”
Finally, let us note that this novel also forcefully celebrates photographic practice as testimony and as art, in that it reveals what no one can hide.
⇒ Nino Haratischwili | The flickering light | novel | translated from German by Barbara Fontaine | 715 pp., €27.50, digital €17
