No one was more attuned to the paradoxes of love than Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Togetherness between two people is an impossibility,” he wrote in Letters to a Young Poet. “But, once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them.”
This paradox – of the twinned closeness and alienation in lovers – is at the heart of Nino Haratischvili’s My Soul Twin, her second novel to be translated into English after the huge success of her award-winning The Eighth Life, a 900-page saga that chronicled Georgia’s plight under Soviet occupation and subsequent struggle for independence. Haratischvili writes in German but was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. Longlisted for the International Booker prize, and nicknamed the “Georgian War and Peace”, The Eighth Life was praised for its elegance as much as its heft; Haratischvili brilliantly combined social commentary with finely drawn characterisation to tell a story of Georgia’s Soviet past that had been largely unexamined. Georgians – many still divided over their Soviet legacy – loved it, too.
