Aka Morchiladze - Journey to Karabakh
It is surely an interesting book, that didn’t quite grab me on first sight, but eventually unraveled in front of me and I now can say, that Journey to Karabakh is fantastic. Maybe not entirely in its story, but definitely in its ideas.
What is one’s home? Where you live or where you were born? The place you are happy at? It’s a riveting question and Morchiladze captures it with the tale of the young georgian Gio, who struggles with those very questions on a journey through Azerbaijan/Armenia, war-riddled countries and at the end might not get an answer.
My favourite part of the book is probably the depiction of his struggle and how Gio can’t get a hold of the place he personally wants to be. The people around him don’t understand him, taking him for granted, but he also doesn’t want to communicate with them. It’s a vicious circle and only in Gio’s own catastrophe he can express this in some way. Both sad and tragic Morchiladze uses the backdrop of the said region (1992), unhinged by the collapse of the soviet union to find the nature of identity and belonging.
To make a greater effort to emphasize a possible metaphorical level (as another review I’ve read suggested), my knowlegde on this conflict back in 1992 and the cultural struggle and meaning is by far not enough, so I will leave it at that for know.
4/5
Ansonsten sitze ich weiterhin an Peter Pan, Childhood's End, Santa Esperanza und nun auch Onkel Dagobert's Biografie.

Ja, ich komme nicht so recht voran. Habe herausfinden müssen, dass Schreiben und Lesen vom gleichen Motivationstrichter ziehen und deshalb vernachlässige ich zweiteres gerade ein wenig.