In the translators’ note at the beginning of Me, Margarita,
Victoria Field and Natalie Bukia-Peters explain that the Georgian language is
full of ambiguities – there are no genders, and no articles. Therefore it can
be hard to tell whether a character is male or female, or whether they are
referring to ‘a house’ or ‘the house’ – a small but significant detail. The stories
which make up the collection are also characterised by ambiguity. We are rarely
told when or where the action is taking place, and details of who is doing the
telling can also be hard to come by. We see snapshots of lives, from bohemian
city-dwellers to the rural poor.
Me, Margarita gives the reader an idea of Georgia’s tumultuous
and contested history. Stories often involve language barriers, as characters
attempt to communicate in Georgian, Russian, German and English, and streets
frequently change names, frustrating anyone trying to track down people and
locations from their pasts. The country has a contradictory character of its
own – the landscape is bleak ('The weather was awful, the sun never rose, and,
on top of that there was no electricity, just death and joylessness’), and yet
it inspires a sort of magical thinking in its inhabitants: 'In this country, no
matter who you ask, everyone says that everything will be alright and wishes
will all come true'.
Throughout Me, Margarita, we see massive geopolitical events
reflected through their impact on individuals. We see characters who have been
displaced by conflicts gathering together and forming improvised communities,
whether the cause is Stalin’s programme of Dekulakisation in the 1930s or the
present day conflict in Chechnya. As the author explains in her introduction, 'it
is clear that if it was not for the three wars after the nineties, the first
and second world wars, the Soviet Union etc, we would have been entirely
different' - by focussing on the
individual, she is able to provide insight into a wider process of social
change.
Kordzaia-Samadashvili’s writing is phlegmatic, and
occasionally vitriolic, but also retains a deadpan humour. She has the ability
to create a revealing and amusing portrait of a character with a couple of
well-chosen phrases, for example Vitiok, 'a typical throwback to the Soviet
hippy era. He was slightly madder than was desirable and claimed to have some
knowledge of Buddhism, as well as rather bold sexual demands'. Another, Stolichni,
'together with many other merits, had Latvian citizenship, a three-bedroomed
flat, and not entirely groundless claims to be a genius'.
Relationships between men and women are a primary concern
throughout the collection, and are generally characterised by suspicion and
contempt. The women are ‘golden girls. Okay, we have stretch marks, cellulite,
difficult personalities and we are horrible drunks, but so what?'. One of her
characters likens love affairs to bare-knuckle boxing. The men are prone to
drink, and to disappearing, and so the women tend to be resourceful. Margo, for
instance, is described as being ‘a bit soft in the head’, but when she reaches a
certain age, 'instead of becoming an alcoholic, or going mad, she set up an
excellent business together with two other cheats', becoming a fortune teller. They
also display a certain romantic fatalism: one, for example, sleeps with a tombstone
of Venetian marble under her bed.
In the midst of these stories, the author has placed ‘When A
Parrot Flies Over You’, a brief and rather beautiful meditation on love and sex
which bemoans the fact that the civil rights movement passed Georgia by.
Typically, this is sandwiched between the mordant humour of An Insignificant
Story of a Failed Suicide ('never mind hanging herself, she'd never even
managed to hang a picture') and the splenetic rant of A Wonderful Evening.
Me, Margarita is an idiosyncratic collection, which balances
bleakness with gallows humour, whilst occasionally throwing in an offbeat essay,
rant or comic observation to keep the reader on their toes.
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