#RivetingReviews: Alexandra Roesch reviews THE LACK OF LIGHT by Nino Haratischwili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

Nino Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light is one of those novels that does not simply depict a world but questions how we look at it. Three women, long since scattered, meet in Brussels for an exhibition by the fourth in their circle, Dina. Her image pulls them back to Tbilisi, to the late eighties and the unruly nineties when the Soviet Union was coming apart, Georgia claimed independence, and hope and collapse traded places by the day. This frame is more than a setting. It shapes the act of remembering, marks the shifts between episodes, and asks what a picture preserves and what it leaves out. Haratischwili brackets the story with the same gesture: the friends once scaled the fence of the Tbilisi botanical garden as teenagers, and decades later they do so again in a Brussels park. The echo of risk and release sets the tone.

At the centre are Keto, Ira, Nene, and Dina, four friends growing up with little protection. There are power cuts and shortages, a brusque new economy, and corridors where weapons appear without warning. There is also a generation that wants to go out, to study, to live a life that is not constantly interrupted. The novel is drawn to this overlap. An evening by the river, a first love, a camera pressed into a young woman’s hand, a choice to pursue a degree, then the sharp rip of violence. The book keeps asking what fear does to ordinary choices.

Structurally, the novel avoids a straight line. That demands attention, and it pays off. What emerges is not a smooth chronicle but a texture of perspectives. Dina’s photographs show this at work. They arrest a moment, while the chapters around them trace the movements before and after the click. One early image matters more once you know its source: a Leica handed down with love and loss. A picture shows strength. A chapter later, we learn the price. A picture shows intimacy, while memory points to the moment someone withdrew.

The characters carry this in different ways. Keto looks for a path that does not harden her. Ira feels her way towards a life outside familiar circles. Nene searches for a foothold where rules seem suddenly negotiable. Dina, whose photographs keep the story moving, goes to places that hurt, including Abkhazia, where the book refuses to look away. Later she works in war zones. She believes in the truth of the image and knows how fragile that truth is. They are not only witnesses to upheaval. They also act, and they make clever, bad, and desperate choices. For a sense of range without plot detail, think of a forced marriage that will not quite hold, a love that ends in a single, stupid shot, a legal career built on pushing back at the rot, and a photographer who goes to war to see what the news keeps out.

The prose leans to fullness. There are sentences with drive, strong images, and a taste for building scenes. It is a deliberate choice. At times the text wants too much, yet that excess pushes it towards real precision. A conversation in a kitchen, the clink of a glass, the effort not to cry, and the moment becomes concrete. Long stretches give way to quick cuts. Memory yields to the present. Silence gives way to speech.

The title points the way. Light is missing, insufficient, or it falls wrong. Candle glow in flats, harsh strip lights in offices, the blaze of sun on a square where shots were later fired. Light is not just a symbol. It is material. It shows what can be seen and exposes what is missed. The title earns its charge in a late studio scene. A cheap shed thrown up outside steals the daylight, and with it the chance to work. The image turns into a straightforward claim that everyone should have enough light. Remembering turns into labour, and because it is labour it remains incomplete.

The English edition, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, reunites the accomplished duo who brought The Eighth Life into English. They hold many voices in clear, elastic sentences without filing down the edges. Dialogue sounds natural. Pace tightens where it should, and breath returns in the still passages. Cultural cues are signposted, never paraded. It is a steady balance of speed and exactness. There is clarity without gloss. What hurts is not left in the dark. The light is never pushed so hard it flattens what should stay in half-light. The return of this duo of translators reads as a promise kept.

The abundance of the novel can invite doubts. The time shifts are demanding, and a few transitions are abrupt. For readers new to recent Georgian history, the human cost, the acronyms, the shifting factions can be a lot to take in. A brief timeline would not go amiss, even as the book supplies context as it goes. There are moments where pathos threatens, where pain and history lean too close. The doubts fade as the storyline insists on complexity. The book refuses a neat balance sheet. It holds on to contradictions. It shows what friendship can bear, comfort, correction, and strain, and how quickly violence reshapes relationships. It is not comfortable, but it is honest. Some readers will want a sterner hand in the middle third.

What stands out, too, is how shrewdly the novel speaks to the present. Without forcing parallels, it shows how near that past is. At times it even reads like a political or crime novel, not for twists, but for the way power, cash, and shame move through a city. Words you think you know, such as collapse, revenge, and corruption, gain weight once they have faces. The characters remain, not as theses but as voices. In the quiet chapters, when an old photograph surfaces years later, when a line takes on a new colour, you hear how finely the tone is judged.

I love the steadiness with which the book insists on looking, scene by scene, without softening the view. I admire the translators’ feel for cadence that give the sentences room to breathe. I could do with one fewer swerve in the timeline, and the odd swell of feeling may divide readers. For me, the balance holds. If you admired The Eighth Life, this belongs on your list. If you think you have had your fill of post-Soviet histories, the human scale here will draw you back. I closed the book with a trace of afterglow, the kind that lingers when you switch the light off. The faces stayed with me.

Reviewed by Alexandra Roesch

THE LACK OF LIGHT

Written by Nino Haratischwili

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

Published by Harper Collins (2025)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Alexandra Roesch studied languages and business before beginning her career in banking. She later earned an MA in Translation from the University of Bristol and went on to become a literary translator. In 2018, she was nominated for the Goethe Institute’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Her work includes translations of Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler, Merle Kröger, Stefanie vor Schulte and Elena Fischer.