The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili: book review

The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili (2020 in English; first published in 2015) is set in the 1990s in the outskirts of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in the Residential School for Intellectually Disabled Children on Kerch Street.

The dilapidated school is ‘officially responsible for the care and education of school-age children with no family.’ After nine years of schooling, the children must leave and fend for themselves.

Lela is 18 years old and living in the school. She ‘doesn’t know where she was born or to whom, who it was who gave her up or first brought her to Kerch Street.’ She finished school three years ago but doesn’t want to leave and the teachers are not pressuring her to.

Her favourite place in the school is the fire escape’s spiral staircase because there’s a ‘strange, sweet smell.’ The aroma comes from the pear field next door.

She has an uncontrollable urge to kill the elderly history teacher Vano. His demise will have to wait because young student Sergo has just been run over by a car, and a ‘deep hush’ overcomes the school residents. And an American couple John and Deborah want to adopt nine-year-old Irakli. Lela wants to ensure that Irakli takes advantage of this opportunity and helps him learn some English words. She’ll deal with Vano after Irakli leaves for a new life in America. That day comes soon enough, when John and Deborah arrive to sign the adoption papers.

This is an interesting, emotive novel in which the desire for aromas, comfort, and a sense of belonging surround the procession of school children and teachers as they face violence, neglect, and misconceptions on a daily basis.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, 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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