The Eighth Life (2019) is set in Berlin from 2006 to 2007, with a return to the year 1900, and the generational history of the Jashi family.
The narrator is 32-year-old Niza, who has left her home town of Tbilisi, Georgia, to move to Germany. She is in Berlin in 2006 with her lover Aman Baron. Her sister is dead, leaving a 12-year-old daughter Brilka. Brilka has run away from her dance troupe who were performing in Amsterdam. She has disappeared, and Niza must find her niece.
Book 1 is about Ketevan and her chocolatier husband, and his recipe for hot chocolate: ‘The Chocolatier managed to unite the French art of patisserie and traditional Austrian baking with Eastern European opulence.’ Ketevan and the chocolatier have two daughters: Stasia and Christine.
In 1900, Niza’s great grandmother Stasia travels to St. Petersburg in Russia with her soldier husband Simon Jashi to his new job, forgoing her dream to learn ballet in Paris. In Russia, Stasia and Simon are caught up in the 1917 October Revolution. Stasia has two children, a boy named Konstantin (Kostya), and a daughter Kitty, born in 1924. Stasia has the secret family recipe for hot chocolate that she got from her father. But as her father cautions her, ‘too much of a good thing can bring about too many bad things.’
Book 2 is about Christine, who travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia. Stasia decides to follow her sister to Tbilisi with Kostya and Kitty. Through the ‘great purge’ of 1935, Kostya leaves in 1936 to follow his father Simon.
Book 3 is about Kostya (Niza’s grandfather), on his arrival in Leningrad, Russia, who befriends a Russian boy, Georgi Alania, and has his first love affair with Ida. Georgi eventually meets Kitty, but Kitty falls in love with Andro. With the Second World War, ‘chocolate was now just a memory of another age.’
Book 4 is about Kitty in the 1940s and 1950s in Tbilisi, performing her songs, which take her to London. Kostya marries Nina and gives birth to Elene, who is Niza’s mother.
Book 5 is about Niza’s mother Elene and Vaso; Miqa, the son of Sopio and Andro; and Kitty and Fred. Elene has two children: a girl Daria, and four years later Niza, the narrator.
Book 6 is about Daria, the narrator’s sister in the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter, 75% into the book, is a lovely chapter on reminiscences and sisterly bonding. Elene marries Aleko, the girls celebrate their teenage years, and entry into adulthood. Amid so much turmoil – and the deaths of Christine, Kitty, Kostya, and Stasia – they celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first free elections in Georgia, Daria and Lasha’s wedding, Georgia’s independence, the end of the Soviet Union, and the birth of a baby girl Brilka. Then, in 1994, Daria dies.
Book 7 is about the narrator Niza and her move to Berlin in 1995 to study. This takes the story to the present day, the beginning – when Niza learns that her 12-year-old niece Brilka, struggling after the death of her mother, has run away and is heading for Vienna.
Book 8, the Eighth Life is that of Brilka, the daughter of Daria.
This is the story of seven women across six generations of one family: Ketevan, Stasia, Christine, Kitty, Elene, Daria, and Niza. This is also about the lineage from Ketevan, to Stasia, Kostya, Elene, and Niza, who must now pass on the secret hot chocolate recipe to Brilka. But where is Brilka?
This is not a short, quick, light, romantic, chocolate story. Far from it. Criss-crossing between Moscow in Russia and Tbilisi in Georgia, with occasional forays into other countries, this is an epic history lesson of the 20th century. It’s about war, exile, empire, repression, family, dreams, love, loss, loyalty, fatherlessness, revolution, rebellion, and liberation – of country, citizens, and chocolate.
Despite the War-and-Peace-like tome, it is a surprisingly easy read. Although slow at first, and quite steady throughout, it picks up pace from Book 6 and the more recent years, when the narrator Niza introduces herself into the story. While not spectacular, this is a solid and interesting read, and given that I have lived in Georgia for ten years, I found it accurate and insightful.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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