Human Sadness

Author: Goderdzi Chokheli

Edited by: Lia Chokoshvili   Cover design: Marie Lane  

Reviews

'A very playful narrative, Human Sadness shifts easily between the comic and the tragic; the short pieces it is put together from often get brutally quickly to the point. The pieced-together presentation - not least with the author's asides thrown in along the way - make for a narrative that doesn't flow smoothly, but nevertheless makes for a fairly cohesive if loose whole. Along the way, Chokheli reflects on and presents questions of life, death, and humanity in a variety of interesting ways. The country-life here has a slight fantastical edge to it, too, but despite how different life here is from that familiar to most readers, in treating these universal questions Chokheli's stories resonate with readers in the 'modern' world as well.
Human Sadness is also an interesting exercise in translation, with editor Lia Chokoshvili explaining at the outset that:
The novel is narrated by five different characters each with a distinct voice which the translation seeks to emulate by having a different translator for each individual voice. Hence the five translator-credits. This seems to have worked out quite well as well; there are no real weak points among the different translations, while the differences between them are not jarring but rather seem entirely appropriate.
Human Sadness is unusual in a variety of ways - not least as a (very atypical) example of Soviet-era fiction - but also enjoyable beyond merely that; it's very good to see this available in translation.'

M.A.Orthofer in The Complete Review