Fed up with working for Time magazine in London, Steavenson moved
to Georgia on a whim. Stories I Stole relates her time there in
twenty vodka-fuelled episodes drawn from all over the country -
tales of love, friendship and power cuts, of duelling (Georgian
style), of horse races in the mountains, wars and refugees, broken
hearts, fixed elections, drinking sessions and a room containing a
thousand roses. Stories I Stole is a wonderful example of a writer
tackling an unconventional subject with such wit, humanity and
sheer literary verve that one is unable to imagine why one never
learnt more about Georgia before. Stories I Stole is a magnificent
first book: erudite, engaged, candid and blissfully poetic.
PROLOGUE: The author visits a bizarre "Stalin theme park"
culminating in the eery viewing of Stalin's death mask SHASHLIK,
TAMADA, SUPRA The author visits Khaketi, where she is introduced to
the tamada culture of "exaggerated hospitality; a point-of-honour
hospitality." During a marathon toasting session at dinner she
realizes "It is a kind of aggression. When they did not know you
well, they filled your glass and filled it again and carefully
watched how you drank it... This was the Georgian way, friend or
enemy with nothing in between. History was lost in tradition,
drinking a way of remembering and forgetting at the same time."
SHUKI The frustration of living with unpredictable power and water
supplies during extremely cold winters; the heat and/or electricity
is often turned off due to reasons ranging from sabotage,
corruption, non-payment, theft, "black clan economics," and
incompetence. Nevertheless this leads to a particular happiness
when the light does come on. The author discovers the heavenly
comfort of public baths. "Times were difficult; people had very
little money. A lot of men were unemployed and all the old good
professional jobs, teachers, nurses, police, engineers, were state
jobs and paid less than $50 a month... Half Tbilisi owed the other
half money." ETHNIC CLEANSING The author visits Abkhazia, where a
refugee has asked her to find the apartment that war caused him to
flee. She finds a woman living there who is a refugee
herself--after her own house was burned down, she discovered the
fully furnished house in Abkhazia shortly after it was vacated, and
has been living there ever since, proudly tending the garden of the
previous occupant. WHO ARE THE ABKHAZ On the beach with Shalva,
whom she suspects is "Abkhaz KGB." He feeds her the party line
about the Abkhaz occupation and she feels like screaming truths at
him. "You won the war. You threw out all the Georgians. You have
your homeland to yourselves (apart from the Armenian villages and
the pockets of Russians) and what is this place? It's a black hole.
There are barely any cars, barely any petrol, no factories, nothing
works, no private businesses, a curfew, no salaries, barely any
pensions, a shell of a university, a terrible hospital, etc. etc."
But Shalva doubts that the West is paradise: "Here we have
everything we need. The land is fertile." THE DUEL The story of
Dato and Aleko--they get into a car wreck and Dato's face is
horribly scarred. Aleko steals Dato's wife and Dato challenges him
to a fight. When Aleko beats Dato up, Dato pulls a gun and shoots
the man until he is almost paralyzed. Dato, meanwhile, lives the
rest of his life with his mother, hooked on heroin. "Not really
Pushkin is it?" LARGE ABANDONED OBJECTS The author drives to
Abkhazia with several journalists to see incumbent Ardzinba win the
presidential election (the journalists rename it the "presidential
farce," since Ardzinba is the only one running. The author marvels
over the abandoned relics of the USSR she sees along the
roadside--rusting tractors, bits of pipline, lines of coal cars
shunted and left along a rail line, etc. For her birthday, the
author goes to Gorbachev's dacha, a palatial house he built but
never got to inhabit because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The house is a metaphor for the USSR: "impressive only for its
sheer size but actually full of empty space and tat."
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