Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Man Was Going Down the Road by Otar Chiladze A Man was Going Down the Road. Looking back at the festive season I realised that the best present I received was a book. That book was written by my late friend, the great Georgian writer Otar Chiladze, and is called A Man was Going Down the Road. It is translated by Donald Rayfield - the ultimate connoisseur of Georgian and Russian literature. This novel is the earliest by Otar Chiladze, written in 1972. I read it years and years ago when it was initially translated into Russian. As the blurb to the English translation says: I still remember my utter joy when reading this book - as if my mouth was full of Georgian grapes and the taste of the famous Georgian wine, be it Kindzmarauli or Akhasheni, sending my head into a spin. I had the same sensation - maybe even stronger - while reading the English translation of the book. But this time my dizziness came from the autumnal clarity of the language, from the transparency of the prose flow, from the typographic quality of the book. It is as if the Georgian wine of Otar Chiladze's novel has been matured even further in English barrels. Here's an excerpt from it. When I studied biology at university in my youth one of our professors loved to repeat the formula: 'Every phenotype repeats its genotype', which in its simplicity means that species, especially in their embryonic development, go through the evolutionary stages of their biologic race. Sometimes I think that we live through the same process psychologically, i.e. repeating in our biographies to some extent the entire world history: the joyful Greek childhood, the Roman adolescence, the sombre Middle ages, the unexpected Renaissance, the wise Enlightenment, etc. The last time I met Otar Chiladze it was in the centre of Tbilisi in 2006 at the flat of another great Georgian writer, his brother Tamaz. Otar told me then that he had written a new novel Godori - The Basket - which I promised to read, but never did. Otar Chiladze died in 2009 and ever since I have lived with the guilt of that unfulfilled promise. Finally, I read it in parallel with the translation of his first novel. Unlike A Man was Doing Down the Road, it's a bitter novel. In a nutshell it's about the intermarriage of Georgian NKVD killers and intellectuals. At the same time the novel's content is much wider - a discussion taking in the place of Georgia in history, its relationship with Russia ("it was digested by Russia 200 years ago to come out through its rectum"), Georgia's current situation in the world and its future. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells the story of the Buendia family, Chiladze tells the story of the Kashelia family over the last 100 years, in which a son kills his father after he suspects him of sleeping with his wife. The novel is written as series of streams of consciousness from different characters, but at the same time could be read as a series of confessionals. It gives a multidimensional view of modern Georgia with all its problems, labyrinths and cul-de-sacs. "We beat our breasts - we are born warriors! Well, every nitty Georgian has a price on the black market - as a detergent, a condom or black pepper . Add to that total theft, encouraged by the authorities and raised to the rank of the state policy . " - one of the characters thinks. Another one repeats: "Georgia has already outlived one life . The world has changed and has been reshaped a thousand times, just to give us a chance to come once again into the world from the womb of the empire through her rectum; no one in this world will give us the room . They would rather splash gasoline onto the linen, and set fire as to the bed of the plague . ". It's a bitter and honest novel which is relevant to all post-Soviet states searching for a new identity. I hope that one day Donald Rayfield, having brought to English readers Otar Chiladze's first book, will translate his last one too. Otar Chiladze. Avelum: A Survey of the Current Press and a Few Love Affairs (Hardback) Otar Chiladze. Published by Garnett Press, United Kingdom, 2013. New - Hardcover Condition: New. Hardback. Condition: New. Language: N/A. Brand new Book. Otar Chiladze's fifth, greatest, most political and personal novel, translated from the Georgian about the collapse of the Soviet Evil Empire and of the hero's own private empire of love, an insight into the predicament of a Soviet intellectual and a newly emergent Georgia. Marching Through Georgia '15. I spent the first two and a half months of 2015 voraciously reading every book about Georgia I could get my hands on. When I learned about A Man Was Going Down The Road , I thought: THIS will be the pièce de résistance of my reading! The book was written by Otar Chiladze (1933-2009), one of Georgia's great 20th-century writers, after all. It was supposed to be about Jason, Medea and the Golden Fleece, It was set in the Colchian city of Vani--a city that is today an archaeological treasure chest just 30 km or so from Lanchkhuti, the town where I spent a week during my stay in that country. Instead it became something more--far more--one of the most challenging and rewarding books on any subject that I have read in recent years. Unraveling the book became for me a task akin to unspooling strings of Georgian letters or twisting my tongue into the shape of six-syllable Georgian words. I got a little ways into the book before I left the USA for Georgia, planning to finish it on the trip. Two things came up. First, other books pushed their way into my life during my time there. Second, five pages were enough to tire my eyes and put me into dreamland. Eventually I got to where I could read fifty pages before moving on to other reading for a time, This never proved to be a page-turner. It remained a challenge. This is what I learned while reading the book. It isn't really about Jason & Medea Statue of Medea in Batumi, Georgia Chiladze has more in mind than just retelling a beloved myth. This is a book about Georgia, and when Jason flees the book with Medea and the Golden Fleece, the story doesn't follow them to Greece. The setting is the court of King Aetes, and the book begins when the boy, Phrixos, and his ram are pulled from the sea and adopted by the king. The legend grows that Phrixos had ridden the flying ram from Greece across the Black Sea, but the reality will set in that Phrixos is merely a plant by the faraway Cretan king, Minos. Phrixos marries Aetes's daughter, Chalciope, and their relationship, initially happy enough to produce four sons, grows distant, marred by Phrixos's longing for his homeland. Jason sweeps in. Medea beguiles the fleece from her father's throne room, and they are gone by page 130. There are 300 pages left! The rest of the book focuses on three characters: Ukheiro , a Minoan spearman and husband of a Colchian exile named Marekhi, who is injured in the invasion of Vani and forced to spend the rest of his life embroidering a sail with images from his life; Parnaoz , the son of Ukheiro whose birth brings about his mother's death and whose star-crossed love for Ino , anchors the final half of the book and Popeye , grandson of Ukheiro whose service to the usurper, Oqajado makes him the book's bad guy. Are these characters Colchian/Georgian? Parnaoz is half Colchian through his mother, but Ukherio's family are transplants and invaders. Parnaoz will return to Crete for a time, where he will meet Daedelus and Icarus. He will hold the hope of ridding the family--and Vani--of the despicable Popeye, but he is plagued by indecisiveness. There are plenty of recognizable Georgians in the book, though. Medea is wonderfully drawn. Consider this scene where she is torn between loyalty to her sister and her growing obsession with Jason: There is a Georgian vintner, Bakha, whose stocks lie at the base of 40 stone steps and whose daughter is unromantically married off to Popeye. There is a mysterious bandit, Shubu, whose presence offers freedom to the romantic runaways, Parnaoz and Ino. Other minor characters will leap out to those who have spent more than the two weeks in Georgia on which my observations are based. It's written by a master of classical style I can't speak for the original format that Chiladze wrote the book in--whether it was prose or verse, or the rhythm of his sentences. Donald Rayfield--but his use of Homeric similes is striking. Consider this simile describing Ukheiro's injured state: Chiladze was fascinated by ancient forms of storytelling. Look at the country where he grew up to understand why. Reading this book really was like reading an epic like The Odyssey . It was a challenge through and through, but it really grows on me the deeper I got into it. It has a hidden agenda Chiladze wrote A Man in the early 1970s while Georgia was still a part of the Soviet Union. The book is allegorical. In the story of how Colchis was overrun by outsiders--and native Colchians like Popeye were turned into informants and torturers--Chiladze is telling Georgia's story.