Wendell Steavenson set out to Georgia on a whim, and i think perhaps this book was written in that spirit.

Perhaps Tbilisi is so random, senseless, and disjointed that it can only be described in this fashion. That is the only way to explain the publication of this hotchpotch collection of pseudo-journalistic tales.

I realise that a clear-minded and analytical style is no longer de rigeur. In the current journalistic climate, we must throw off the constrictions and constructions of objectivity. Facts and information are cast aside like unwanted shoes and socks as we rush down to the emotive sea of raw experience, and immerse ourselves in the ubiquitous moment, becoming part of the fabric of the social life of a place.

Wendell lays her confused and heated experiences out before us the way an indifferent waiter might lay out a plate of scrambled eggs. There you go. Make of those what you will.

I learned a little about the Georgian life, Chechens versus Russians, trials and tribulations. But not much, in fact at the end of it i wasn't even sure if Tbilisi was even in Georgia. (It is). And i certainly couldn't immediately relate any facts, vignettes, or sentences that might help you make sense of what this book is about.

If you choose to write journalism in this style, a style which can loosely be described as 'poetic', then can you honestly complain when a reviewer pens a raw review which ducks and weaves about its subject and generally discombobulates the reader?

Yes, of course you can. So i will be as clear and analytical and to the point as i can.

This book is awful. It is awful because it does not engage the reader. It seems that the characters described in the book are interesting and engaging to the author. But to the reader, they barely rise above the flatness of the page. The writer is, or was (it is not clear which) in love with a Magnum photographer called Thomas, and is spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get over her painfully recent acquaintance with him by sitting in cold rooms with unreliable power and lousy food in some kind of journalistic ritual of self-flagellation. But such involution scarcely engages the reader. Who cares about Thomas? Well, obviously the author. But to the reader, he is just some random dude with a camera.

"Tbilisi in winter is a bad place for a broken heart," Wendell writes, and this pretty much sums up what this book is about.

Big deal. Carnarvon in summer is not much better for mending a damaged soul, but hey.

And what is it with a book which finishes - and then has another 36 pages to go? Afterword. Ethnic glossary. Bibliography. Acknowledgments. It's a metonym for the whole doomed Magnum photographer relationship. When it's over, it's over. Start a new book.

Sorry if i sound harsh Wendell. I really tried to like this book. I even went to the trouble (and believe me, it was trouble) of finishing it. I liked the idea of what you were trying to do. It is a poetic, exotic, and exciting project. For you. But not, as a reader, for me. Perhaps you embarked on an impossible task:

"I realized that there were a thousand things that I knew; a thousand stories, odd bits of juxtaposed fact and that it would be impossible to explain them. The retelling would stale the joke, simplification edit out the pathos."

In fact, yes.

Recommended: No