Translated from German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.
Published by Scribe, 2019, 934 pages. Original version published in 2014.

“And I’m afraid of these stories. These stories that constantly run in parallel, chaotically; that appear in the foreground, conceal themselves, interrupt one another. Because they connect and break through each other, they betray and mislead, they lay tracks, cover them up, and most of all, they contain within them hundreds and thousands of other stories. …
“I’ll start with Stasia to make my way to you, Brilka.”

Twelve-year-old Brilka, in Amsterdam on a school trip from Georgia, sneaks out of the hotel, and buys a cheap train ticket to Vienna. What makes a 12-year-old go to a place she has never been to before? What was she searching for? When her grandmother Elene is informed, she calls her daughter, Niza—Brilka’s aunt who lives in Germany—to go and find her.

Niza decides that Brilka deserves to know the truth about her family so she can write her own story without being burdened with what went before. Niza begins the story of her family, the Jashis, with her great-grandmother Anastasia, or Stasi, following the family’s fortunes as they live through the “red century” in Georgia.

Stasia’s father is a successful chocolatier, whose reputation depends on a secret recipe. His real treasure is his hot chocolate: thick and unctuous, lifting the spirits of those who drink it and leaving them craving for more. But when he makes it for his wife, in the effort to persuade her to have another child, there are unforeseen consequences. This convinces him that the recipe is cursed. This secret recipe—and its curse—are handed down through the generations.

The family’s fortunes are tied up with the politics of their age, and through the lives of the Jashis, we also get a history of Georgia. Stasia marries Simon Jashi (the first of the Jashis to appear here), also known as the White Lieutenant. There is discontent with the Tsar, revolution is brewing, and there are several factions. Simon throws his lot in with Trotsky and joins the peasant army, leaving for Russia two weeks after the wedding. Eventually, Stasia, fed up of waiting for him, follows him to Petrograd. But he isn’t there, and she eventually returns home alone. The Bolsheviks are now in power.

Stasia’s sister, the beautiful Christine, is married to a successful businessman in Tbilisi. But her beauty catches the eye of the Little Big Man, who is powerful, ruthless and a sexual predator, and his attentions have irreversible repercussions for the couple. (Nino Haratischvili refers to the two Georgians who rose to power in the USSR by epithets only: the Little Big Man is Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the secret police, and Stalin is the Generalissimus.)

And so we follow the Jashi family through five generations. Stasia’s son Kostya joins the navy and makes a name for himself. His sister Kitty is much more of a free spirit, and falls in love with Andro Eristavi. However, when the German army marches on the Soviets, Andro is persuaded to join the Nazis. He does so, without reflecting on the consequences, and Kitty has to pay the price.

Which brings us a little closer to the narrator, Niza. She and her sister Daria (Brilka’s mother) are the daughters of the lovely Elene, Kostya’s only child. But Elene is far from being the perfect daughter Kostya hoped for.

The book is divided into eight parts, each focusing on one of the women, with the exception of Kostya. The women are the keepers of the family history: Stasi told Niza their story, and now Niza is writing it down.

There are things that echo throughout. It is not just the chocolate that is cursed. There is a strain of unhappiness and misfortune running through the family, which seems to hit the three beautiful women—Christine, Elene and Daria—the most. And it is their less beautiful sisters —Stasia and Niza—who try to save them. Vienna also recurs through the book as a place where several members of the Jashi family dream of escaping to.

Although there are a few parts that drag towards the end, this is a thoroughly immersive book. I was completely absorbed in the story of the Jashi family. Ann Morgan said in her review that, by the time you get to the later portion of the book, it feels like remembered history, rather than just something you’ve read. When I got to the Glasnost period and thought back to the Stalinist era, that is exactly how it felt. (I could have done with a family tree or a list of characters, though.)

This is a novel about how we are an intrinsic part of our family history, and our individual story is just one of the threads in an endless tapestry. Haratischvili has written an engrossing and complex book. Read this when you really want to get lost in a story.

The eighth section, the last one, is titled Brilka and left blank. Brilka now knows the truth about those who went before her, and is now free to create her own story.