In 2020, Nino Haratischwili was nominated for the International Booker Prize for The Eighth Life, an almost 1000-page-long historical epic telling the history of the twentieth century in Georgia. For her follow-up, The Lack of Light, she turned to a period closer to her heart: the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s Georgia. As Haratischwili, who lives in Germany and writes in German, told me, “It was very difficult to explain my youth and my childhood to friends here, because when they talked about the nineties, they were talking about MTV and going out. For me, the nineties were Kalashnikovs and civil war—very harsh times.”

The Lack of Light is told through the eyes of four close female friends who live in the same apartment complex in Tbilisi: Keto, the narrator, whose brother Rati becomes involved in organized crime; Dina, her best friend, an iconoclastic photographer who is romantically involved with Rati; Nene, the daughter of the city’s leading crime family; and Ida, a closeted lesbian who pines for Nene but can never express her feelings due to the period’s regressive politics. In the first pages of the book, we learn Dina has died by suicide, and the three surviving friends have reunited after decades of separation at a retrospective honoring her work. Over the course of the book’s 700-plus pages, Haratischwili lays out the complex relationships between the girls, their families, and the men they love, who are doomed by corrosive masculinity and organized crime.

“At some point I felt, Okay, this is a little bit bigger than I may have planned in the beginning,” Haratischwili tells me of her epic novel. “But for me as a reader, it really doesn’t matter how long the book is, as long as it is good.” The Lack of Light is more than good, it’s a universe in and of itself that captures the nuances of a society that led the young men to violence and forced women to contend with that brutality. As the book makes clear from the beginning, not everyone makes it out alive.

In our Zoom conversation, Haratischwili and I discussed nostalgia for hard times, post-Soviet corruption, the novel’s reception in her native Georgia, and more.

Morgan Leigh Davies: You use a framing device of the surviving friends reuniting at an exhibition of Dina’s photography throughout the novel. How did you decide to structure it that way and use photography as the center of the book? 

Nino Haratischwili: I was looking for a structure that would help me to get some distance. I always need distance—in time or geography—to be able to write. It’s a fictional book, but a lot of things in it are very personal to me. So I needed the distance.

I decided to structure the book so it has two timelines. It felt more natural to describe the nineties from a distance. I thought about using a funeral, but then I thought, they would just go there, say hi to each other, and then separate. I had already started that book, and one day, I had the idea of this exhibition where they would be forced to remember.

I really do like photography as a medium. So I thought, Okay, let’s try to invent some photos. I was inspired by the nineties: we had a lot of great photographers. I tried not to copy them, but to get inspired by their aesthetics—I had fun creating the photographs. After I had this idea of exhibition and the two timelines, the writing process became much easier. It was like a puzzle that came together.

MLD: Reading the book, there’s such a feeling of nostalgia, but also a strong feeling of ambivalence—a lot of what happens is horrible and traumatic. But I think it’s hard for anyone to look back on the past without some form of nostalgia coming up.

What was the process of conjuring this place you love while writing about really violent and complicated things that took place?

NH: You’re right, of course—I’m not really sentimental about that time because it was too harsh, too dark. I was lucky enough to be younger than the girls in my novel, so I was not really aware of what was going on. I was just a kid, I still felt protected by my family, by my parents. As a kid, you can easily get used to things. You don’t have anything else to compare it to, so it’s easier. For the older generation, like my parents, it was terrible. It’s a nightmare imagining being as old as I am right now, having kids and responsibilities, and living back then.

Some years ago, before writing this book, I went to see a great film from a female Georgian filmmaker, called In Bloom. It’s about two girls growing up during that time. I was invited to a preview during a festival here in Germany. It was a very nice summer night in Hamburg, and we went out in the yard afterward. There were some tables and wine, and there were a lot of Georgian women between 30 and 50. I hadn’t met them before; we didn’t know each other. 

Everybody was inspired by the movie. Everybody was remembering, talking, and sharing their experiences. They started saying, Oh, do you remember this and that? Do you remember the lack of electricity? Do you remember the violence? Do you remember the tanks? Do you remember the robberies? It got more and more terrible somehow. Very violent stories. I was observing and listening more than sharing my experiences, and I was observing the faces of the Germans. I realized, Okay, they’re shocked and becoming more and more shocked. But the very funny thing—I mean, not really funny—was that all the Georgian women were talking with excitement, with smiles on their faces, laughing a lot. It was like, Yes, yes, you remember, yes, I remember, and do you remember? If you didn’t know what they were talking about, you could think it was a party.

Then I realized, they’re talking about their childhood or youth. This period of life shapes you so much. Everything happens for the first time. None of the other phases in your life are as important. The first disappointment, the first excitement, the first love—first, first, first. You have this one childhood, this one youth—even if it was terrible and dark and violent—and you kind of miss the way you were back then.

The Germans were like, Oh my god, they all need therapy. I think this describes the mixed feelings I have about that time. I do remember a lot of very, very good stuff from the nineties, like empathy, being together, helping each other. I never experienced that later. I think everybody was aware we were depending on each other so much. Maybe because you never knew what would happen tomorrow, or if tomorrow would even come. You long for this feeling of being alive and being together and sharing things. I remember a lot of friends of my parents came every evening, and each of them would bring some food. They were drinking wine, laughing a lot, telling jokes, even singing, sitting with candles like they were in the eighteenth century. Of course it was a little bit absurd, but it’s a very human condition. When you feel in danger, you start to become more and more aware of things that you appreciate.

MLD: To that point, the relationships between the girls are so beautiful and moving, but at the same time there is always the weight of violence pushing down on them. It’s from their neighborhood but also from the unfurling national crisis. How did you write that conflict?

NH: It’s easier for me, as a reader, to understand huge political, historical stuff when I focus on characters. It’s easier to understand when it’s not a statistic. When you read, “20,000 people died,” it’s unimaginable. If I can follow a character, experience what he or she is experiencing, it becomes touchable.

The other thing that was really important to me was telling the story from a female perspective, because that period was very masculine—there was this toxic, mutated, degraded masculinity myth. When I think about it in hindsight, I really feel pity for them. They were very young guys. I was surrounded by them at my school, and a lot of them didn’t make it; they’re not alive anymore.

During that period, a lot of men had drug problems, went to war, had this criminal stuff going on, and didn’t survive. Women had to hold everything together. A lot of them went abroad to survive. They could not afford to be depressed. Men like Keto’s father were paralyzed for years because they could not cope and could not adjust, but women couldn’t afford that. For me, it was a tribute to tell this story from a female perspective.

Now, when I go to Georgia and meet teenagers, they’re so Western-orientated and open-minded. For them, it’s unimaginable that we had these values back then. In writing this book, I understood that these values were mutated and degraded because the whole society was. Everything collapsed and nothing worked, it was completely anarchistic.

MLD: In the book, you draw connections between larger problems in Georgia and these smaller instances of male violence. How were these things connected?

NH: Back then, I was not thinking about this—I had no space for empathy for the men. But while writing, I realized that a lot of them were victims of that system. I don’t think everyone who ended up in the criminal world was born a criminal; they were totally normal guys from totally normal families. 

It was a sick time, a sick environment, a sick society. That is what happens when people don’t fear any kind of consequences for their behavior. It was rooted in the Soviet system, which was so corrupt that nobody had any kind of trust or belief in it. Everybody knew the state was stealing. You could buy everything, diplomas, status, whatever. So the thinking was: The biggest criminal is the state. When something bad happened, nobody would call the police because they knew they would get in much bigger trouble.

A parallel system arose where you had to steal. It was presumed to be better because it was a Robin Hood thing. Okay, you steal, but you steal from the biggest monster, you steal from the state and you share it with poor people, or you help somebody. This kind of thinking was already in their bodies and their flesh and their bones. They were completely used to it. It had started long before and climaxed in the nineties.

MLD: Women who are related or romantically involved with these men are treated like objects, yet still have emotional attachments to the people hurting them. The conflict really destroys these women; we see Keto self-harming, and Dina eventually dies by suicide. How does that dynamic work and what are the ways out?

NH: It’s a sadomasochistic chain. I know a lot of families in Georgia who lost everything due to their drug-addicted sons; who sold houses, apartments, even jewelry to rescue them. There was no rehab, no awareness. This was combined with shame. Somebody died at 23, 24, 25 and it was always, Oh, it was a heart attack, but everybody knew exactly what happened—it was heroin and so on.

Keto and Dina realize there is no healthy reaction. There cannot really be harmony in that kind of relationship, because there is hierarchy and they are objects. Even if these guys are in love, still, the system does not allow them to be free and to live the lives they want to live.

It’s impossible to do the right thing as long as you stay inside the circle. It was like a curse, and it lasted over a decade. I really do know a lot of people from my school and neighborhood who experienced these stories, lost their kids, lost everything. In our society, family is so important—you have to do everything for them. If your family member is jumping into the abyss, you’re following him. Mostly, of course, you couldn’t rescue them.

If you examine this from the point of view of love, it becomes clear that the women end up the way they do with these guys because the environment is a jail. You can only break out by leaving. There’s a scene where Dina is saying to Keto, just leave the country, go, because I cannot, but you can. Keto gets angry and asks why, what’s the difference between me and you. And Dina says, I cannot overcome this. She feels a duty. You cannot say she’s only a victim. I follow you, even if you jump. That is what happens to her. 

MLD: One of the most interesting moments in the book is when Ida goes after the whole system in her role as a prosecutor, and her friends treat her like a traitor. Decades later, in the frame narrative, they make peace. Why did you decide to end the book on this moment of hope?

NH: That’s a very good example of what I meant about the system being so damaged and sick that it’s impossible to do the right thing. The different reactions I received about Ida and her decision from Georgians and Germans were very interesting. Of course, the Germans were all like, it’s like the best thing she could do; but a lot of Georgians were wary. It’s still kind of a betrayal. 

Because there is so much suffering in the book, so in the end, I thought, we need some hope. As a reader, if I read this book, I would need, not a Hollywood-style happy ending, but the kind of hope that allows you to think, This is something and it’s over. It’s really over. At the end, it’s up to the women to see if they can reinvent their friendship and somehow stay connected. There is a moment… I felt huge relief while writing it, and it was very emotional for me. The women are sitting in a bar, drinking and talking, and Keto starts observing them. She says that they share this dinosaur love and that the way they loved and lived is not possible anymore. Nobody else really understands—after Keto moved to Germany she expected sympathy and wanted to be liked, but never expected love. At that moment, she feels a really strong connection to Ida and Nene. I think it is the beginning of her starting to let go of the past.

MLD: What has the reception been like in Georgia in general?

NH: I often get feedback like, It’s about me, it’s about my youth, it’s about my neighborhood, it was how I grew up. Not from my generation, but my parents’. They often mention that it’s too painful and they had to put it away for a while. One thing that my mother said after she read it was, Oh, how I hate remembering that time. I think the book feels very personal to some Georgians. It makes me humble if they feel represented by it.