Taking on the Weight of the Word: Nino Haratischvili’s Juja

Nino Haratischvili has said that personal history didn’t significantly factor into her fiction until her third novel, 2014’s The Eighth Life, a Brobdingnagian epic chronicling the twentieth century in her native Georgia. She was born in the capital, Tbilisi, in 1983, when the country was still a Soviet Republic, and spent the chaotic first years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union moving between Georgia and Germany, where she ultimately settled in 2003. She was perhaps reluctant “to open the door” to writing directly about her homeland prior to The Eighth Life, but creating separation—both physically and linguistically, by writing in German—helped her craft a title hailed as the Georgian War and Peace.

Haratischvili’s 2010 debut novel, Juja, was written during a time when she was still adapting to those new surroundings, still processing all that was lost. The novel has a less ambitious scope than The Eighth Life but tackles an equally daunting subject: the freighted desire for inspiration, purpose, and identity that is so often sought in art by those who read, view, listen to, or otherwise interact with it. Juja is newly available in English, thanks to a seamless translation by Ruth Martin, and in this earlier work readers will not only encounter a host of characters considering what it means to live for literature, but glimpse the young author determinedly searching for her role in the world.

Juja comprises the stories of a handful of characters, hailing from Australia, France, and the Netherlands, who are variously drawn to the lodestar of Jeanne Saré, a teenage runaway in Paris. The girl never had a father, and the “woman who had birthed her” sent her away to boarding school, which she fled at age fifteen. Two years later, in 1953, Saré throws herself in front of a train at Gare du Nord. Her story survives in an experimental novella she leaves behind titled Ice Age, Book 1, which appears at intervals throughout Juja. All of the novel’s individual storylines are doled out in similar piecemeal fashion, though as with other works of interlocking tales, the characters and their stories eventually converge.

Though Saré’s slim volume was purportedly written in the ’50s, it is not published until the early ’70s, one of several hints to its questionable origins. Other tocsins come when readers are first introduced to Saré through a perspective that indicates the girl is being seen, or possibly conceived, through someone else’s eyes: “Her eyes, gray and empty, laughed too. Yes, her eyes … They must have been gray and very clear and somehow dead, beautiful and ugly all at once. Yes, they must have been.”

These biographical sections of the Ice Age chapters usually accompany italicized passages from the novella itself. (It was never clear to me whether Saré’s biography is meant to be understood as part of Ice Age, Book 1 or background only available in the world of Juja.) Saré’s literary voice is a grandiose first person full of fantastical references to mythology, Shakespeare, and other seminal texts. It is also positively bursting with the kind of nonsensical or illogical pronouncements that, devoid of literal meaning, are ripe for appropriating symbolic meaning: “I knew the eight sides of the moon. [. . .] The sand made love to me every night, I had become so beautiful.” Another time: “Raindrops fall on the lungs. I leave. Achilles, my dead love, is waiting nearby. I marry the silence and I find happiness in unhappiness.” And again: “Let me stay, we don’t know each other any longer, let me stay, let me hold you, let me watch over your footsteps, let me love—stupid, aimless love—but let me do it anyway, let me, just let me, I will eat up your pain in poems that I will engrave on your body.”

Both the novella and Saré’s biography also include more narrative episodes where the girl experiences various abuses that women continue to face with depressing regularity from men and society at large. She is followed, harassed, groped. She trades sexual favors for opium and food. And she frequently pushes back, becoming an aggressor herself. But the aggregate desperation of her situation steadily wears her down. By combining universally recognizable touchstones like poverty and sexual violence with literary generalities, Ice Age becomes a bit of a blank slate for many fictional characters who come across it, its power ultimately deriving largely from each individual reader’s past or present circumstances. This open interpretation empowers lost souls, but also leads to tragic outcomes, including a string of copycat suicides.

The four characters who, along with their assorted friends and family members, are shaped by Saré’s life are all unhappy and searching for meaning. Patrice Duchamp is a university student in Paris in 1968. While his younger sister and his girlfriend thrill to the student protests roiling the French capital, Patrice would rather sit up all night writing stories and communing—perhaps literally—with his unidentified muse. Eighteen years later, Olga Colert is also studying in Paris and, like Patrice, has a friend attracted to social-justice issues that don’t interest her. Olga, which is an alias for reasons that are never revealed (“she had a more average name, a Western European one, but that doesn’t matter now”), finds a copy of Ice Age at a Parisian bookstall and grows obsessed with it. In 2004, Francesca Lowell travels to Paris from Sydney, Australia, seeking perspective on her strained relationship with her teenage daughter, and solace in her continuing struggle to process a horrifying trauma. That same year, Laura van den Ende and her two PhDs leave Amsterdam for Paris to research Saré’s life. Her decision is ultimately motivated less by the pestering student who begs for her help than by the combination of her quotidian troubles, including sibling rivalry and professional ennui, and existential demons, like linking her stillborn son with her divorce.

These storylines are dotted with halting stylistic flourishes indicative of a new author exploring her toolkit. Patrice is often referred to simply as “Brother,” and dialogue between him and his family members is formatted like a script. Francesca’s chapters are titled “Woman (2004),” and her interior monologue is presented in all caps, which in 2024 feels somewhat discordant given that the format so often denotes screaming. Sex scenes late in the novel become increasingly, albeit consensually, violent, but the implicit reason for this aggression eluded me, so those moments often took me out of the narrative.

Our world is rife with texts like Ice Age, Book 1, vessels able to accommodate the beliefs, the emotions, the desires of their readers—religious volumes, samizdat, creepypasta, the writings of Karl Marx, Nicolai Chernyshevsky, even J. K. Rowling. And it’s not only literature, but art in general, as Laura highlights during a discussion with Francesca about a Mikhail Vrubel painting in Moscow:

The picture never made any statement. You had to give yourself over to your feelings, to your own state of mind, and transfer it to the picture. And that’s the essential truth of it. I mean . . . this whole business, this [Saré] story that has so many people caught up in it, isn’t much different. The story itself tells you nothing, but it allows you to find yourself in it.

Juja uses its constituent narratives to explore the various degrees of intensity with which humanity can interact with art, as well as the many reasons we might seek solace in the fictional lives of others. Haratischvili also explores the enduring quality of myth, the nature of creativity, and the roots of conspiracy theories and apocryphal narratives—about both authors and their creations. The book’s emphasis on descrying the identity of the author of Ice Age sometimes feels overdone, as so often the actual author doesn’t matter nearly as much as the interpreted meaning of their words, though it is also true that our society can get caught up judging the art based on the behavior of the artist.

Juja does not have any explicit ties to Georgia, though it is perhaps of note that Saré is born in 1936, the same year that the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was officially formed and that the Georgian-born Joseph Stalin began purging hundreds of thousands of opposition figures from Soviet life. Saré and Stalin both then die in 1953. These chronological coincidences are likely just that, coincidences, especially given the mindset of the novel’s other, as yet unmentioned, character: Haratischvili’s authorial avatar. Juja includes a dozen brief chapters labeled “Me (2005),” narrated by someone who is “young, female, and [. . .] from an ‘exotic’ country.” That person isn’t thinking “about the great horrors of the world we live in, but about all the small, personal ways in which an individual suffers.” One of those individual sufferers being herself.

The novel’s version of Haratischvili exists narratively outside the world of Jeanne et al., but like them, she would like “to find a new identity,” having “lost the old one,” presumably when she left home. A large part of these chapters consists of the author being hard on herself—wallowing in her situation, which is genuinely awful; lamenting her lack of friends, though she treats the few she has with disdain; and breaking down her perceived weaknesses: “I am entirely composed of banalities.” She seeks escape in travel, but realizes that no matter how much you move around, you carry your problems with you. You can’t escape your own story.

Haratischvili laments that she “blunder[s] around in other people’s stories, trying to find my own. I can never find the right street, I get lost . . . How can I find my story in this one?” I don’t know that the autofictional chapters in Juja are integral to its overall story (except the final one, where Haratischvili explains that the novel’s title refers to a song about a “person worth loving [. . .] whose love for you is worth even more”), but I’m nevertheless glad they are included for what they say both about the author’s mindset and her views on writing at the time. Haratischvili’s avatar mentions that she read a story “about a girl who seems to have been very unhappy and who caused other unhappy people to become unhappier still.” It is ultimately that story she is prepared to write down. By the end, the unhappy girl may be the author herself, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters—for the reader and for Haratischvili—is finding your own story. You can start with the lives of others, but no matter how many times you try to get lost, you will still end up with yourself when you close the cover.

Juja by Nino Haratischvili, translated from the German by Ruth Martin (Scribe, 2024).