Memories That Await Like Land Mines

Danica Jenkins reviews Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel “Hard by a Great Forest.”

By Danica JenkinsFebruary 7, 2025

• Fiction

THE OTHER DAY, my local veterinarian in Tbilisi, Zurab, casually mentioned that he had hand-raised two Siberian tigers after catastrophic floods decimated the Georgian capital’s zoo almost a decade ago. “Where?” I asked. “At my place,” Zurab replied, as if keeping two wild cats in a modest city apartment was to be expected in such circumstances. “Then one day some guys came and took them.” “Where?” I asked again. Zurab didn’t know. But a few nights later, he got a call informing him that one of the tigers had escaped. “Or more likely,” Zurab sneers, “the idiots in charge got drunk and let it out for fun.” Zurab panicked and told the caller he was coming immediately, imploring them not to do anything rash. By the time he got to the scene, the tiger had been shot dead. “Why the hell didn’t you just use a tranquilizer gun?” he cried, devastated. The idiots in charge didn’t have one. “And they never did,” Zurab added. “Why the fuck would you take two grown tigers without having tranquilizer darts on hand?”

I’ve become accustomed to stranger-than-fiction stories like these since moving to Georgia a year ago. In the past three decades, after achieving independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the small Caucasian country has faced more upheavals than many nations face in a lifetime: a coup d’état, civil war, separatism, revolution, a flood of biblical proportions—not to mention war with Russia, its belligerent neighbor to the north, who invaded the country in 2008 and still occupies about a fifth of Georgia’s territory.

More recently, Georgia has been making global headlines for its authoritarian turn, overseen by a government with increasingly antidemocratic tendencies, evidenced by a Kremlin-style crackdown on civil liberties. Scenes of state security forces using water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi over recent months conjure memories of a much darker chapter in Georgian history. They also diminish the promising successes at democratization and Euro-Atlantic integration that the country has achieved despite multiple challenges and setbacks.

I never found out what happened to the other tiger under Zurab’s care, but reports of wild animals roaming the city in the aftermath of the 2015 deluge give some idea. Uncaged lions, jaguars, wolves, and hyenas forced residents to hide indoors, and while most of the escaped creatures were eventually shot dead by special forces, hundreds of others trapped in the zoo drowned. Famously, a hippopotamus cornered in the city’s main square was subdued with what seemed to be the only tranquilizer gun in town. Many people, too, lost their lives as the city all but washed away.

The surreal chaos of this moment is captured in Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard by a Great Forest (published last year in hardcover by Riverhead Books, and now available in a paperback edition). In this engaging debut novel, a young man, Saba, returns to Georgia 18 years after fleeing the war-torn country as a child, now in search of his brother and father who have mysteriously disappeared. With nothing but a trail of cryptic clues to guide him, Saba arrives back in Tbilisi just in time for the epic flood, and is disoriented when his airport taxi is intercepted by a hippopotamus. “That’s Boris,” chuckles his driver, the inimitable Nodar, a cigarette hanging from his lips. “Welcome to Georgia. […] [T]hese idiots […] will be herding that poor animal all night.” In Georgia, the veil between life and fiction can often seem thin.

The novel, which uses elements of magic realism and a cast of compelling characters to broach themes of civil conflict, exile, homecoming, and grief, is deeply personal for Vardiashvili. Like his protagonist, the author lived through Georgia’s turbulent post-Soviet years of civil war in the early 1990s, which “left Tbilisi wall-to-wall fucked with no electricity, no gas, no water, and no food in the shops,” before claiming asylum in the United Kingdom when he was just 12 years old. Vardiashvili returned to Georgia as an adult many years later.

When Saba describes being back in his former hometown as “the way your teeth feel after the dentist leaves you with unfamiliar edges,” there’s a sense that Vardiashvili is grappling with his own experience of displacement—trying to pin down the uncanny feeling of being innately familiar with a place, yet disconnected from it simultaneously. “I began to recognize things,” Saba muses, as if recounting a visceral but rapidly fading dream. “At the same time, I didn’t recognize a damn thing.”

Vardiashvili’s attempt to capture the unsettling experience of return after exile drives the novel’s vivid evocation of place. The breadcrumb trail left by his missing father, Irakli, and brother, Sandro, leads Saba deep into his family neighborhood of Sololaki, the oldest district in Tbilisi: a “disorderly assortment of houses, flats, shacks, and balconies in Sololaki is interconnected by a complex network of washing lines,” which winds its way up through the contours of the city’s distinctive peak, Mtatsminda (or “Holy Mountain”). Overwhelmed with the task of facing “memories that await […] like land mines” while he searches for a house he barely remembers, Saba leans in to an “eerie homing instinct” that helps him retrace key moments and landmarks from his past, many of which he’d rather forget.

The clues left for Saba by his brother are scraps of their father’s unpublished play and passages of fairy tales graffitied on derelict walls—remnants of the stories their mother, Eka, had read them as boys. Together these fragments form a lexicon whose deeper meaning is derived from the shared, painful, and unarticulated memories of a broken family, in the same way that ellipses and silences often connect the shards of traumatic recollection. Using the “bootleg, motherless language” the brothers created as young refugees to cope with the loss of their mother and their homeland, Sandro’s riddles scrawled throughout Tbilisi aim to communicate directly with Saba without alerting the attention of a shady detective who is hot on Irakli’s tail.

As the search drives Saba farther across Tbilisi and outward through the rugged terrain of “proper Georgia,” his own story becomes a conduit for the nation’s deep-rooted historical legacies. Descriptions of Tbilisi’s “schizophrenic” architecture testify to the vestiges of Ottoman, Byzantine, Persian, Russian, and Soviet influences as much as to the city’s subjection to centuries of invasion, razing, and rebuilding. A colossal statue of a woman standing vigil next to a fortress on the city’s horizon, holding a sword in one hand and a cup of wine in the other, warns that Georgians treat guests as “a gift from God” but deal with enemies ruthlessly. In legends of ancestors making “last stands” against raiders, the mountains of the country’s most remote regions serve as natural vaults for books, poetry, paintings, relics, grapevine cuttings—“everything that makes a Georgian a Georgian.”

Woven seamlessly into Saba’s quest, the novel’s description of Georgia’s longue durée and folklore tells the story of a nation forged at the crossroads of empires. Through Vardiashvili’s characters, we see how this history has coalesced over centuries into a cultural mentality of survival and resilience, sharpened by the upheavals of the post-Soviet era. It is a legacy that has left its mark on the novel’s cast in the form of gallows humor and generosity of spirit—but also as resentment, desperation, and cruelty. One of the author’s greatest achievements through his storytelling is to show how collective trauma links these two spectrums.

With the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Georgia faced a paradoxical transition. Independence offered the promise of national sovereignty after years of oppression and a systematic Russification dating back to the Tsarist era. Yet the collapse of Soviet rule also dismantled the economic and social infrastructure that had provided stability and peace in Georgia for decades. “It was during that bleak winter,” Saba recalls, that “bewildered, hungry people wandered the streets, punch-drunk by their sudden poverty.” As political upheaval gave way to civil war and separatism, erstwhile Soviet citizens found themselves “watching ragtag militias fight over a republic barely born.”

Several devastating moments from that period force their way into Saba’s consciousness, both through memory and via the voices of ghosts who have haunted, taunted, and guided him since landing back in Tbilisi. These fragments convey the experience of civil war through the eyes of a child—“when a stray tank shell breaks the sound barrier by your bedroom window, screams on, and deletes the corner grocery shop and the entire family living above it”—but also its aftermath: the witnessing of a father’s deterioration in exile as he fails to scrape together the financial means to reunite his sons with their mother. “We watched him erode,” Saba says. “Once, he fell asleep at the table, spoon halfway to his mouth. […] Sometimes you have to laugh at a thing to strip it of its power.”

Trauma, by its very nature, resists conventional narrative structure and exists outside normal frameworks of understanding and memory. Rather than follow a clear beginning, middle, and end, it manifests in recursive loops, flashbacks, and cognitive gaps, making it difficult to work through and overcome. The fragmented nature of the experience finds a natural home in fiction, which has a capacity for speculative imagining as well as the ability to move through time and perspective in a nonlinear way. Fiction can give sense to the chaos of traumatic experience while maintaining a safe level of psychological distance.

Metaphor plays a central role in this regard, as the novel demonstrates: the tragedy of the flood stands in for a deeper grief too challenging to be tackled head-on. The pathos of Tbilisi’s unfettered and slaughtered zoo animals lies precisely in their innocence, while the beasts who remain at large (such as Artyom the tiger, who stalks Saba in the Mtatsminda forest) are compelling allegories for the dread, guilt, and anxiety that can burden survivors long after the traumatic event has passed.

This indirect approach to representation mirrors how trauma can manifest through oblique channels; at the same time, it creates an outlet for emotional authenticity that bridges individual experience and mutual understanding. In one devastating scene, Saba and Nodar watch a news report of the flood’s decimation of a dog shelter. Horrific footage shows “rows upon rows of muddy dogs,” even puppies, drowned in their cages. Though the men don’t discuss the incident—the older, a refugee from Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia, has lost a daughter, while the younger has lost an entire family to war and exile—it functions as a proxy for the grief that unites them.

On a broader scale, however, the flood exemplifies the long-term difficulties faced by post-conflict societies. War destroys critical infrastructure and sets back years of progress in institutional reform, health, education, innovation, and economic development, limiting the state’s capacity to deliver basic services and maintain stability, let alone adequately respond to crises. It also leaves deep psychological scars on riven communities that can last generations.

The path to rebuilding requires more than physical reconstruction and new political frameworks; it also demands a profound process of historical reckoning and collective healing. Without this deeper work of coming to terms with the past, which includes acknowledging shared trauma and rebuilding sociocultural and institutional trust, postwar societies remain vulnerable to future conflicts and lack the resilience required to face new challenges. There’s a revealing line towards the end of the novel, when Saba and Nodar break through the militarized border of South Ossetia—and the former is shocked to find that locals, not Russians, have salted the earth, ensuring decades of desolation: “They don’t want us back,” says Nodar. “Can’t blame the Russians for everything.” It’s a trenchant point.

Addressing the past remains fraught in Georgia, particularly during the present explosive moment of upheaval. Not only have successive governments since independence produced competing interpretations of recent history for their own political gain, but a series of overlapping crises have also left little public space—or desire—for the painful process of collective self-reflection. The situation is further complicated by generational differences in remembering the Soviet period, with older Georgians often holding ambivalent memories of an era that provided stability despite oppression. These tensions are exacerbated by the deeply personal nature of the 1990s conflicts, when Georgians fought not just Russians but their own neighbors as well, creating new wounds over unhealed scars. With Russia’s ongoing occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, these traumas remain active, demonstrating that legitimate concerns about foreign interference can coexist with the need to critically examine domestic vulnerabilities.

In damaged or divided societies like Georgia, and in the absence of comprehensive truth-seeking initiatives from above, literary works like Hard by a Great Forest can penetrate the empty spaces in civic consciousness. By bearing witness to trauma, engaging civic memory, and addressing complex moral and ethical considerations of guilt, responsibility, and suffering in discursive rather than didactic ways, fictional works can play a role in preparing the ground for more formal processes of reckoning.

Although it has recently been translated into Georgian, Vardiashvili wrote the novel in English rather than his mother tongue. In addition to providing the distance required to treat such a personal story, this choice also likely gave him more authorial control over vexed subject matter. His voice joins others from his generation, such as Georgian-born German novelist Nino Haratischwili, who are writing about their homeland from the outside, creating a powerful diasporic opening for national redress and renewal by using the universal human practice of storytelling.