The Wine-dark Sea

A Faust for the post-Soviet era, Peter Zhghenti is a writer and a translator, living in Georgia and dealing with his own Mephistopheles in the form of Writing itself. Bargaining for his soul, and by extension the soul of his beleaguered nation, Zhghenti finds his life contaminated by figures and incidents out of the classics of world literature as much the political and social realities of everyday life. A postmodern watershed in Georgian fiction, Wine-dark Sea follows in the tradition of such novels as Mulligan Stew and At Swim-Two-Birds.