Zaza Burchuladze’s Adibas is a jagged, satirical Georgian novel set in a city where war, branding, sex, pop culture, political panic and luxury-consumer boredom all blur into the same bad signal.
It follows a cast drifting through Tbilisi while conflict presses in, but is sort of ambient. The bombings are mentioned almost casually, news and rumour circulate, and everyone seems at once terrified, distracted, horny, bored, stylish, compromised, and permanently online before “online” quite became the whole condition.
The book has a nasty comic brightness to it, which you can kind of feel from the icky of the cover. The aesthetic hums with swimming pools, fake reggae style, celebrity references, paranoia, nationalism, pornography, bodies, music, cheap glamour, military dread. All the absurdity of living through history while still being annoyed by cocktails, clothes, exes and other people’s taste. It is very much in that post-Soviet/post-2008 zone of capitalist hallucination. The world is ending, but someone is still talking about collagen injections.
Good for readers of contemporary Eastern European fiction, Dalkey Archive oddities, post-Soviet satire, Pelevin, Sorokin, Houellebecq-adjacent social rot, or anyone drawn to fiction that treats geopolitics as something experienced through malls, pools, screens and bodies.
Dalkey Archive Press paperback, first edition, 2013. Originally published in Georgian as Adibas by Bakur Sulakauri Publishing in 2010. Translated by Guram Sanikidze. Very good second-hand condition, with light handling and shelfwear only.
