Observer Review: Narratives I Stole By Wendell Steavenson Essay, Research Paper

Guns, roses and vodkaStories I StoleWendell SteavensonAtlantic Books? 14.99, pp320When Wendell Steavenson was populating in Georgia, she kept a aggregator & # 8217 ; s list of & # 8216 ; LAOs & # 8217 ; & # 8211 ; big abandoned objects. The Caucasus is littered with them: corroding armored combat vehicle hulls, gutted flat blocks, the Rustbelt of mammoth destroyed mills that surrounds most metropoliss. The biggest Lao is the late Soviet Union itself. Cipher wants to re-animate it. But cipher realised what the monetary value of trashing it would be.A few decennaries ago, Russians assumed that if everything blew to spots, Georgia would still be a happy land. Fantastic fruit and veggies, oceans of vino and brandy, a beautiful coastline ; the Georgians would be even better off than earlier. Alternatively of which, the visible radiations went away. There was a brainsick civil war, two wholly evitable sezession wars, which evicted a one-fourth of a million destitute refugees, and the economic system collapsed.Eight old ages after independency, Steavenson spent winter like most Georgians, kiping in her apparels and reading by candle flame, in a level where electric visible radiation, heating and hot H2O came on merely for a few unpredictable hours of ecstasy each hebdomad. Children asked their parents what radiators were for. Adults, lasting on vodka and rotten coffin nails, asked what the Georgian authorities was for.In malice of this, aliens who visit Georgia are still entranced. Hospitality to aliens is a faith. Steavenson & # 8217 ; s life there began with one of those eternal Georgian field daies that start as a tiffin and terminal in the center of the dark, borne along by the eternal toasts and addresss commanded by the Tamada ( maestro of ceremonials ) . & # 8216 ; I was happy ; charmed, rummy and beguiled like 1000s of invitees and encroachers before me, in the land of hospitality. & # 8217 ; But shortly she understood that those who make aliens happy are non ever happy themselves. Coercing invitees to imbibe excessively much can be an act of aggression. What is it like to be a Georgian host? Steavenson & # 8217 ; s friends endlessly told her narratives about their state, and acted out its composites in their lives. One astutely gave her Lampedusa & # 8217 ; s The Leopard and allow her read & # 8216 ; Georgia & # 8217 ; for Sicily. & # 8216 ; All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is truly wish-fulfilment ; our sensualness is a yen for limbo, our shot and stabing a yen for decease & # 8230 ; The Sicilians ne’er want to better for the simple ground that they think themselves perfect ; their amour propre is stronger than their wretchedness & # 8230 ; Having been trampled on by a twelve different peoples, they think they have an imperial yesteryear which gives them a right to a expansive funeral. & # 8217 ; Two of her familiarities, Dato and Aleko, were fly-by-night immature & # 8216 ; biznesmen & # 8217 ; . Dato was severely disfigured in a auto clang ; while he was retrieving, Aleko seduced his married woman. The two so confronted one another by a lake, accompanied by their friends and umpired by a minor & # 8216 ; godfather & # 8217 ; . Aleko knocked Dato down ; Dato pulled a gun and shooting Aleko in the dorsum, temporarily pa

ralysing him. One of Aleko’s seconds then shot Dato in the leg. Nobody won. Both men sank into terminal depression, deepened by heroin and alcohol.A ‘hankering for death’? Steavenson takes this gloomy little vendetta tale and turns it into a haunting, Chekhovian story about pride, futility and self-destruction. Stories I Stole is anything but a travelogue, although she moves through many landscapes and sick cities. It is not a hack’s diary, although she is an experienced foreign correspondent and hunted with the little band of ‘Caucasus Hands’ who risked their necks in Chechnya or Nagorno-Karabakh. And the book isn’t one more ‘quest for the real me’, although one strand in it is her account of an agonising love affair. This is the first published book of a practised and very gifted writer, a young Kapuscinski with a literary future ahead of her.She made several expeditions to Abkhazia, the tiny country that broke away from Georgia in 1993 and which the world – as a punishment – has dropped into an oubliette: unrecognised, its communications cut off, its ruined towns unrepaired. Few strangers can enter, apart from Russian ‘peacekeepers’, UN agencies and an international corps of aid workers, from Oxfam to the Halo Trust – the quiet professionals who clear mines all over the Caucasus battlefields. Steavenson, used to Georgian resourcefulness (like the art of running an electricity meter backwards) was depressed by the stagnation of Abkhazia: ‘its head was down and its listless subsistence gaze directed at the pavement’.While she was living in Tbilisi, the second Russian war in Chechnya broke out, driving streams of refugees across the mountains into northern Georgia. Steavenson went into these kidnap territories and lived among the hard-drinking Svans and semi-pagan Khevsurs. She spent days and nights at remote border posts interviewing families escaping the war, and Chechen fighters – survivors from the hellish fighting before Grozny fell – crossing the frontier to rest and re-group.One of the most intense sections here records a visit to the remote Pankisi valley, where she was protected by her friend the famous Chechen commander Arbi. (That lawless place has just been selected as a target in the ‘war against terrorism’ by US special forces; their move into Georgia and America’s re-training of the Georgian army may well end in renewed war all over the region.)Her lover, a Magnum photographer, came back to her from the war after nine months of silence and rejection, and proposed to her in a freezing hut in Pankisi. She cried, but found the strength to say no. Then he did a wonderful, Georgian thing (although he was a German): after days and nights scouring the flower-growers of the countryside, he sent her a thousand red roses. It became an instant Tbilisi legend. In that warm-hearted, ramshackle city, Wendell Steavenson will always be the girl who got a thousand roses and still turned the man down. For her readers, though, she will be remembered for this first book by an immensely talented writer.