HARD BY A GREAT FOREST

Vardiashvili’s Kafkaesque debut follows a Londoner’s dark journey home to Georgia, his native country, to search for his missing father and brother.

When Saba Sulidze-Donauri and his older brother, Sandro, came to London as children with their father, Irakli, in 1992, their mother had to stay behind in Georgia, where she died. Years later, Irakli returns to Georgia and two months later writes his sons, now young men, that he’s gone to the mountains and they should not look for him. Sandro flies to Georgia anyway, emailing Saba that he’s found a trail to Irakli. Then Sandro’s emails stop, so Saba, an insurance salesman, also heads to Georgia. Vardiashvili, who left post-Soviet Georgia himself when he was 12, has infused his ambitious first novel with the traumatic energy of the refugee experience—Georgia’s history as a country continually invaded and destroyed is never far from Saba’s thoughts—as well as with an indefinably Eastern European sensibility combining melancholy, cynicism, and absurdist wit. Saba is obsessed with finding Sandro and Irakli but also obsessed with the past. Although he hires a guide, the intriguing taxi driver Nodar (who almost steals the novel), he also follows a host of voices from dead relatives and friends offering advice and grievances. As he continually eludes the shadowy police authorities tracking him, his pursuit becomes an increasingly desperate cat-and-mouse mystery. But Saba frames his hunt as a version of “Hansel and Gretel” in which he follows the trail of clue-crumbs his brother has dropped: hidden literary illusions, both playful and dark, in oblique graffiti messages and pages from a play Irakli once wrote. Saba finds himself in a world full of menace where the borders of the real and surreal blur, where wild animals that have escaped the zoo roam the countryside, and human killings occur as randomly as do moments of hope and humanity.

An unforgettable aria to a lost homeland, full of anger, sorrow, and longing.