The Lack of Light

Haratischwili's novel is anchored to a single device: a 2019 photo exhibition in Brussels, whose images trigger flashbacks that unspool decades of civil war, gang violence, and a heroin epidemic in post-Soviet Tbilisi as experienced by four women. Reviewers have called that structure both the book's organizing intelligence and its drag, since the constant cutting between the framing device and the historical narrative interrupts momentum right when the emotional stakes are highest. What holds it together is the friendship at its center, which carries the same mythic, high-intensity register readers of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels will recognize, love and grief pitched louder than realism usually allows. It's long, and it knows it, but the intensity rarely slackens.