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Daur Nachkebia: Берег ночи (The Shore of Night)
This book was published in English in a volume called Two Volumes from the Caucasus. The other volume is Guram Odisharia’s Guram Odisharia: პრეზიდენტის კატა (The President’s Cat). The two writers deliberately worked together. We are co-authors and we shall be jointly responsible for it. Both are a reaction to the war in Abkhazia which saw Abkhazia break away from Georgia, of which it had been a part, with the support of Russia though, as we shall see, the two novels are quite different in style. As the foreword says The President’s Cat is the radiant day to the dark desperation of Nachkebia’s The Shore of Night.
Reading these two novels together is quite a challenge. I read The President’s Cat first and it was, as mentioned above, cheery, light-hearted ans a joy to read. This one could not be more different. It is set partially in the Georgia-Abkhazia war though jumps around chronologically, taking in both the pre-war and post-war eras.
Our narrator is Beslan. He had fought in the war and, as we shall see, comes out of it mentally devastated. The other key character is Adgur A.
The two men had known each other before the war, though they whad been particularly close but drifted apart. Adgur had kept a notebook during the war and when he was killed during the war, the notebook is given to Beslan. While telling his own story he will continually quote from Adgur’s notebook. We learn early on how Adgur died and it seems he essentially committed suicide. It seems before he died he had had a few mental health issues and smoked a lot of weed. I’m writing to nowhere he says in his notebook and it seems that he never expected anyone to read it.
After the war Beslan returned to the place he had rented before the war, in the house of an elderly couple. They had kept his stuff and welcomed him back. He moved to the flat of an elderly relative who had died during the war.
The city was in chaos and we are spared none of the details. Looting, murder, seizing abandoned properties were the norm. The madness of insatiable greed, the illness of seizure and robbery took possession of many. They carted off everything they could get their hands on. When one neighbour’s property was being robbed – she was Russian with a Georgian husband – Beslan, who has kept his weapons – intervenes.
Belsan stays in the city – even he is not sure why. He has no job and no money and is half-starved. He had studied physics before the war and now consoles himself reading Stephen Hawking. He could not return to the shabby university, to the damp, dimly lit laboratory, to the retirement-age instruments to once again wear holes into his trousers with phantasmatic scientific work. He was finished with physics. It had become odious to him and now lay like a corpse in his past. This sums up his general feelings – he cannot accept what has happened, cannot adapt to the new world and has no idea what he is going to do The war and Adgur A.’s writings, however, changed something in him. Something shifted. His life divided itself into before and after and everything that had been with him or inside him before seemed unreal to him, a formula into which had crept some error
He takes to going to the library and reading biographies to see how others coped with life. There are girlfriends, particularly Natela, who says she gets no pleasure from sex and will eventually go off to Moscow – she has no reason to stay – leaving him somewhat distressed.
We learn a lot about the war from both Beslan and Adgur who describe in detail what they felt while fighting, their relationships with their fellow soldiers and what they thought of the enemy. You suddenly become insensitive and do what you need to do. You shoot, kill, run if necessary, you hide your head and spew out curses all the time. There are no great acts of bravery, no famous victories.
But much of the book is the two men describing their life both before and during the war and, in Beslan’s case, after the war and it is grim all the way. There is no happiness or joy either with life or even with the war ending – just misery, boredom, pointless soul-searching, wondering what and why and finding no answers. The few things that meant anything to him before the war, such as studying physics, seem irrelevant and without any redetermining features. “Such sadness and hopelessness were so spread thickly, all around him like tar, that he wanted to shoot himself.
And as for Adgur I think that Adgur A. wanted to find his soul in the war. But there was too much life in the war.
Publishing history
First published in 2007 by Al’ta Print
First published in English in 2024 by Academic Studies Press
Translated by Felix Helbing