Synopses & Reviews
Fact and fantasy collide in this visionary, literary “feast” starring historical Norwegian poet and dramatist Dagny Juel (1867-1901), a beautiful woman whose life found her falling victim to one deranged male fantasy after another. An inspiration to such celebrities as Edward Munch, August Strindberg, and Gustav Vigeland, the “Queen” of Berlin bohemia in the 1890s, she met her death at the hands of her lover in a Tbilisi hotel room in 1901. Here, her story becomes a phantasmagorical mixture of religious mysticism and eroticism, bound up with the mythic origins of civilization, and taking in everything from shamanic art to Bach’s Art of the Fugue, from gnosticism to modernism, from magic to linguistics. Also present at this feast are Joseph Stalin, his terrorist friend Camo, the guru and composer George Gurdjieff, the Georgian poet Vazha Pshavela, August Strindberg, and and Gornahor, a raven-like creature from the planet Saturn.
Synopsis
A Georgian writer descending into a cross-cultural literary underworld, bargaining for his own soul and the soul of his nation.
Synopsis
A Faust for the post-Soviet era, Peter Zhghenti is a writer and a translator, living in Georgia and dealing with his own Mephistopheles in the form of Writing itself, which has taken the form of the Phantom of the Opera. Bargaining for his soul, and by extension the soul of a nation now weathering the storm of globalization, Zhghenti soon finds his life contaminated by figures and incidents out of the classics of Eastern and Western literature, as much the political and social realities of his everyday life. A postmodern watershed in Georgian fiction, Wine-dark Sea follows in the tradition of such novels as Mulligan Stew and At Swim-Two-Birds, while blazing a trail of its own.
Synopsis
A phantasmagorical mixture of religious mysticism and eroticism, bound up with the mythic origins of civilization, and taking in everything from shamanic art to Bach’s Art of the Fugue.
About the Author
Zurab Karumidze got a degree in English Language and Literature from Tbilisi State University. He obtained a PhD for a dissertation on “wit and conceit in the poetry of John Donne.” In 1994 he spent a year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar studying American postmodernist fiction. His publications include essays, short stories, novels, and a history of jazz.