A Man Was Going Down the Road by Otar Chiladze
Instead of taking place in the time before the Jason and Medea myth, the story is set in Georgia, the modern-day state that was once Colchis, the birthplace of Medea. There aren’t many errors, and the translation is lovely. Jason and Medea are depicted in the medieval picture, which is inappropriate given the book’s semi-fairytale perspective and current tone (open-eyed narrators of bizarre but personally felt events and relationships). Just the first third of the book is devoted to the “story” of Jason and Medea. The second part follows a different family of emotional invalids and misfits while remaining in the same setting and including some of the same individuals.
A Man Was Going Down the Road by Otar Chiladze
3 used from $37.74
Amazon.com
One travels to Crete in the role of a stonemason (to assist in the construction of Minos’ palace at Knossos), but there is no longer any sense of a genuine landscape due to the weight of exaggerated, incoherent angst careening about in a sea devoid of fish against a tan and grey sea light.
This book is both exceptional and challenging, weird and yet driven by an odd, disinterested intimacy. Although the reader feels a distance from the events, the people are real and unforgettable, and it is their inner lives that provide the narrative’s glue.
The water moves away from Vani throughout the course of the book as its residents are born, have children, age, and pass away. Everyone appears to be at least vaguely aware that they are performing a drama written by fate, which is both mysterious and unavoidable.
The main characters of the play are not the mythological heroes that Chiladze so liberally appropriates; rather, they are menial despots whose hold on power is eroding, physically and psychologically handicapped mortals trapped in mourning for their loved ones, wives and husbands unable to understand one another, innocent children learning how little the world cares for them, and people consumed by ruthless obsession, many of whom are agonizing over the suffering they cause others in.
Several well-known characters from Greek mythology appear in the book, passing through on their way to their individual deaths in the background: Jason, Medea, Minos, and Daedelus are a few examples. The frigid Caucasus, talking parrots, and ancient near-eastern tones all find a home on the distinctly Georgian palate, which also has room for talking parrots and castrated stablemen.
The book’s charm, however, is not in the myth’s recounting, which it avoids doing outright; rather, it is in the subtly reworking of tired motifs into an entirely unique, beautiful, and moving tragedy. The Heroic Age of antiquity is now our own, and it is characterized by unbelievable fortunes and broken individuals. They are included in Chiladze’s sibylline view of the past.
Despite being Chiladze’s first novel when it was released in 1972, it has the air of the creation of a skilled, if eccentric, craftsman. His writing is audacious and seductive, shifting seamlessly between the points of view of the protagonists and their rambling mental states before abruptly watching them from a distance as if the reader were residing in a timeless realm created by their thoughts and desires. Strange analogies and images abound, blending so thoroughly and occasionally ambiguously with actual events that they appear to be the foundation of the characters’ universe rather than merely literary devices.
It provides little hope for those of us who feel, like Chiladze’s creations, out of place in the world—virtually everyone, deserving and undeserving, endures great personal suffering—but if one is patient, one will discover that Chiladze has prepared a banquet of human hopes and miseries that gleams with curious enchantment, and whose often bitter flavour is laced with the honey of dizzying poetic insight.
