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Human Sadness
Human Sadness is a classic Georgian novel translated into English for the first time. Set in the harsh mountain world of Soviet Georgia, Goderdzi Chokheli’s 1984 novel is a journey through life, where ‘every character is a story’, where the real and the magical intermingle. The story is narrated by five distinct voices, each of which was translated by a different translator in order to preserve its individuality.
The book begins as a frustrated young novelist comes across a collection of notebooks and letters documenting a strange military campaign, of which his grandmother was a part. One winter, the inhabitants of Chokhi, a remote village – primarily women, children and old men, as most of the young men are away tending to their flocks – decide to reassert their power over the neighbouring villages in Gudamaqari Gorge. Traditionally, Chokhi has reigned supreme in the region, with Chokhian men enjoying the right to claim any women from the surrounding villages as their wives. When a Chokhian boy is turned down, his mother enlists the other villagers in a campaign to conquer the other villages. Along the way, the Chokhians document their progress and collect the worries, memories, folktales and philosophical musings of both their fellow conquerors and the villages they conquer.
The book begins as a frustrated young novelist comes across a collection of notebooks and letters documenting a strange military campaign, of which his grandmother was a part. One winter, the inhabitants of Chokhi, a remote village – primarily women, children and old men, as most of the young men are away tending to their flocks – decide to reassert their power over the neighbouring villages in Gudamaqari Gorge. Traditionally, Chokhi has reigned supreme in the region, with Chokhian men enjoying the right to claim any women from the surrounding villages as their wives. When a Chokhian boy is turned down, his mother enlists the other villagers in a campaign to conquer the other villages. Along the way, the Chokhians document their progress and collect the worries, memories, folktales and philosophical musings of both their fellow conquerors and the villages they conquer.
160 pages, Paperback
Published June 7, 2024
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March 30, 2025
I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation, but as a work in its own right, this is an incredible book that (contrary to its title's gesture at the monotonously tragic) vacillates in a masterful, deeply satisfying way between the amusing, the sad, the philosophical, and the bizarre. The plot is secondary in importance to the individual stories and philosophies swept up by the marauding Chokhians, so any summary fails to capture what the book is really like — it's best just to read it. I highly recommend you do if you are a fan of the uncannily real, of the tragically comic, of Borges and Bulgakov.
Displaying 1 of 1 review