Nino Haratischwili's The Eighth Life : Language, Nation, and the World

This paper analyzes Nino Haratischwili's international bestseller Das achte Leben (für Brilka) (2014), translated into English as The Eighth Life (2019). Living and working in Germany while writing in German as well, Hartischwili has played a key role in the recent internationalization of Georgian culture. With Georgian literature invited as the guest of honor at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Hartischwili served as a spokesperson. However, this gesture directly contradicted Georgia's cultural branding, which relied on the uniqueness of the Georgian language. As such, this paper explores why Haratischwili was deemed the most suitable writer to showcase Georgia's culture to the world. The paper reflects upon the combination of local, national, and global elements in The Eighth Life , a novel that has found massive success in translation, including in Georgia. Telling the story of six generations of women in a Georgian family, while capturing Georgian history along with global twentieth‐century events, several concerns typical of the so‐called global novel permeate the text—whether one understands the global novel as a poetic form or as a material process of circulation. Significantly, however, the nation is not absent from the equation: a quest for identity and anxieties about what it means to be Georgian infuse the novel. The novel appears to take the form of National Allegory while seeking out belonging at a larger scale. Meanwhile, ambivalent feelings concerning the Georgian language permeate the discourse of those agents involved in the novel's circulation.