Living through the dark: A reflection on Nino Haratischwili’s “The Lack of Light”6 min read
Nino’s Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light (2025), recently translated into English by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, offers a raw and honest look at coming of age in 1990s Georgia. The book follows the joys and struggles of four young women, united by the love and trauma of their intersecting lives. At the crossroads of the shared courtyard of their childhood homes in Tbilisi, Haratischwili paints a microcosm of Georgian society, of how people cope with grief, social upheaval, economic collapse, and the promise of hope, in different, often self-destructive ways.
Our narrator, Keto, arrives at an exhibition of her friend Dina’s photography in Brussels. Scanning the gallery, Keto reflects on her childhood with her best friends, Nene, Ira, and Dina. Except Dina will not be joining the group in Brussels. The exhibition that reunites the friends 30 years later is a posthumous one. With each photograph, Haratischwili transports us into a vignette of the girls’ youth, as we piece together the twists and turns of the choices that led them all to this very moment.
We first encounter the four adolescent girls as they scale the gates of the Tbilisi Botanical Garden one balmy summer evening in 1987. The romantic Nene, fiery Dina, pragmatic Ira, and sensitive Keto are all at the cusp of womanhood, while their country is on the cusp of falling apart. Despite the gasps and giggles of the girls’ illicit trip to the garden, the dewy darkness foreshadows a sinister force descending on the girls’ lives, and the country.
“We stand on the threshold of life, at the start of the friendship that will demand everything of us, but we don’t know that yet, we don’t know the hand that life has dealt us. The game still hasn’t begun, and we can still be free, still want and wish for everything.”
As Keto revisits Dina’s photographs in Brussels, we see the collapse of Soviet Georgia, not just as a political construct, but as the fuel of chaos and pain. It materializes in Dina’s lens slowly and viciously, over stovetops by candlelight, in hushed tones in dark corners during dinner parties, in illicit deals in alleyways, in students doubting their futures in school hallways. And we see how it slowly snuffs out the light in four lives on the brink of adulthood.
As weapons and heroin flood into the capital, we see the underbelly of power and crime through the eyes of the sensual Nene, as she pursues love at all costs, only to be crushed as a pawn in her family’s ambitions.
We feel the skepticism and distrust in the political system through the eyes of the studious Ira, as she navigates her identity and rebels against tradition. We see the construction of the steadfast moral compass that fuels her passion for law, and her ambition, which both helps and shatters those she holds most dear.
As the civil war erupts in 1991, we are on the frontlines in Abkhazia with Dina, the firebrand, as she hunts for meaning and truth against the backdrop of personal and collective tragedy. Her camera is the fifth member of the friend group, as moments become memories, the tragedies and little joys of life captured on film, only to be rediscovered decades later in a swanky gallery in Belgium.
And through Keto, the sensitive narrator, we see how three generations try to cope with the country’s chaos in their own ways. Against the backdrop of energy cuts, food shortages, and increased gang activity, street violence slowly infiltrates the family apartment with devastating consequences. While Keto’s brother is pulled deep into the criminal world for survival, her father bemoans the system that both built him and destroyed him, and Keto’s Babudas, the two squabbling grandmothers, dream of the Georgia of their youth, before Sovietization.
In many ways, The Lack of Light is also about the individual struggle for agency. In and out of the vignettes of their youth, a stark gender divide emerges. All four girls’ trajectories are heavily influenced both directly and indirectly by the men around them. Time and time again, they are left picking up the pieces after the choices of brothers, uncles, boyfriends, fathers, even strangers, go awry. Too often they are caught in the crossfires of a fight not their own, left to fend for themselves. In one particularly harrowing scene, young Keto finds her classmate Anna, once the school beauty, in a state of shock after a brutal assault by members of her brother’s rival gang.
“I thought of all her sunny prospects, the promises life had made to her when she was young, and now here she sat, in my absent friend’s clothes: a red-painted clown, her body covered in bruises. What wanton gods were playing this wicked game with us? Why! Why!”
“Because we women can take it,” her classmate responds.
The vulnerability of the four girls is striking; they are each other’s source of comfort and protection. That is all that is left when the system fails them, both at home and in the streets. The girls’ parents are phantom figures in the book, seemingly crushed into the shadows by the weight of their own defeatism, clinging to a version of their country that has evaporated before their eyes.
For all of its rawness and brutality, The Lack of Light is above all, a story of the power of friendship, exploring how intimacy is a force for protection and endurance, but also a weapon of destruction. To be sure, the protagonists are shaped by their environment and the people in their orbit. But the further the book unfolds, we see how the middle aged women we meet in the present day are not only victims of circumstance, but also witnesses, and even accomplices, in their own undoing. Keto remains haunted by the past, while determined, and yet unable, to overcome it. Nene overcompensates the heartbreaks of her youth with a renewed agency that translates into sexual exploits. Ira rationalizes her choices as just, despite the wreckage left in their wake.
Haratischwili asks of us, are we the final sum of circumstances thrown our way, or of the choices we make? What do we choose to conceal and reveal in the making of our personal narratives? And at the end of the day, who is really to blame for our misfortunes?
The Lack of Light is also a reminder that the fight for a nation’s future unfolds in small, often seemingly inconsequential battles constantly raging within each of us. Governments come and go, but real change can be the sum of a million small choices, made by each of us, every single day. We can chip away at it over decades, with little results, then it comes crashing down like an avalanche overnight. Haratischwili’s story of Georgia’s ‘lost generation’ challenges some of the mythology of the post-Soviet era that still persists in Western imaginations. It is also hard to ignore the parallels to the present day. What of the generations of young people still fighting for a better future on the streets of Tbilisi? Kyiv? Minsk? Chisinau? How will their stories unfold?
The fight to keep that glimmer of light alive, continues to this day, across the region, the world, and in all of us.
