I know, it’s only been two weeks since the last Travel Library but a) I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of Georgia posts that are starting on Thursday and b) I wanted a bit of breathing room between getting home and getting the first post out. Of course, today’s book isn’t technically about travel. Nor is about outdoors or adventures. Today’s book is Kvachi by Mikheil Javakhishvili and it’s a work of classic Georgian literature – fiction! Actual fiction in Travel Library! It’s part of my Tbilisi homework, to read something Georgian and picked mostly because it exists in translation and I was able to get my hands on a copy.
My first impression was… well, horror. This is among the largest paperbacks I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s the size of my beautiful all-in-one Narnia edition. If this is the size of a paperback, are you going to be building houses out of the hardback version?? Fortunately it’s not so bad inside. It’s divided into seven chapters, which I might have named “parts” and each chapter is broken into several sub-chapters of about six pages each. It’s so much easier to read if you tell yourself “you only have to read to the next sub-chapter”. That said, I was astonished how easy it is to read an entire chapter in one go, especially given my long-held aversion to “classics”. Let me tell you, each of the seven chapters represents one bath over the three or four weeks I took to plough through this behemoth.
What is Kvachi about? Well, Kvachi Kvachantiradze is the title character and this book is the story of his rise and fall – many, many rises, and many, many falls – throughout his life as a conman, womaniser, businessman, political figure and otherwise schemer. One person once wrote a blurb for the English translation and everyone else just repeats it; in which this book is described as ‘a hilarious romp’. Sounds great, huh? We love these anti-heroes who get up to hijinks! Except Javakhishvili has committed the cardinal sin – he’s utterly failed to make his scoundrel likeable. Kvachi is absolutely intolerable as a precocious child and arrogant teenager. He’s a little better as an adult but that’s only because he’s been forced to grow out of the precociousness.
Kvachi is born to a poor (but noble, with their title stripped a couple of generations ago) family in rural Georgia and the first thing he does as an adult is to move abroad. I find it odd how this is held up as a Georgian classic with a main character who deplores his homeland so thoroughly. Maybe its just a classic of the literally dozen Georgian books that have been translated into English. Kvachi is set in the early 20th century and features the title character’s influence on Rasputin and the First World War and I’m afraid I have no idea what the Soviet countries were doing in their pre-Soviet days so I’m not actually certain how much is “abroad” from Kvachi’s perspective. Kvachi half-heartedly studies (and mostly schemes) in Odessa, then moves on to bigger and better places more fitting to someone who calls himself Prince Napoleon Apollo, like St Petersburg and Paris with side-trips that we don’t necessarily see in too much detail, like London and New York.
I’ve already said that Kvachi isn’t likeable. A character can be an objectively bad person and still be likeable – see the MCU’s Loki vs Thor. It’s frustrating that Kvachi doesn’t get that treatment. But something that struck me very early is that you never quite feel like you know Kvachi. You’re always kept at arm’s length, even when you’re being told exactly what he’s feeling and thinking. Kvachi could quite easily be made likeable without actually making any changes to his character if you could just feel like he was letting you in. A character spectacularly arrogant enough to call himself Prince Napoleon Apollo has got so much potential to be a favourite and he just doesn’t pull it off!
Oh, the story rattles in at a pretty good pace. It’s astonishingly readable considering its genre, size and unlikeable star. Bit repetitive, though. Kvachi makes a ton of money, lives like the playboy prince he thinks he is, falls out of favour with whatever influential figure he’s hanging out with in this chapter and becomes destitute only to be filthy rich again three paragraphs into the next chapter. We get Kvachi the revolutionary, Kvachi the counter-revolutionary, Kvachi the power behind the throne – oh yes, history has conspired to make sure no one ever hears the name of Kvachi. It slows down a lot towards the end as everything closes in around him, he runs out of friends, he runs out of escape routes, he runs out of money and… well, look. I’m not taking the end as the actual end. It’s hard years but if there’s one thing this character does, it’s scheming and conniving and I know there’s a whole other life – several other lives – that we don’t see after we turn the last page.
Do I feel like I know Georgia better? No. Kvachi turns his back on Georgia, it’s not big enough or good enough for the likes of him and then he returns, kind of ashamed he ever looked at his homeland like that. It does make me wish I had time to go to Kutaisi because I feel like we get to know that town better than we get to know Tbilisi. Do I know more about the Georgian psyche? Not really, no. Do I feel like I’ve got anything out of this book? Well, I quite enjoyed it, so I don’t regret having read it. I’ll be able to mentally put my hand up and go “I’ve read one of your Georgian books!”. But I don’t think Kvachi is any more representative of Georgia in general than Pride & Prejudice is of England. Glad I’ve read it. Might pick up again when I get back and see if my thoughts and feelings towards it have changed. And on Thursday come my first impressions of actually being in Georgia, so I’ll see you in Tbilisi for the next few weeks!