Zaal Samadashvili’s new book Time is a collection of novellas and various other writings. This is not about the past, but about time as preserved and perceived by a writer’s eye, with his unbiased sense of reality. Real stories, characters and a narrator, too who doesn’t invent, omit or add anything to phenomena: he just tells us about them, as he saw and felt them at a particular time. This attitude to time endows the book with such maturity and acuity that is has no trouble in finding a response from the reader. And there is one other important aspect which charges these novellas with quite a different energy: that is the thoughts about heroism and chivalry, and, as a result, about freedom and love. The fate of the novellas’ characters is imbued with this thought, or thoughtlessness, which is yet another reminder of the chivalrous romanticism of the human race…

In a story which has the same title as the book, a tragic detail of Georgian history is described, a young officer’s self-sacrificing battle against the Russian Red Army. Another story concerns a prisoner who is allowed to leave prison, just for a day, only so that he can explain to his children why he has to live in a cell. In this collection you will meet an artist who compares stages of development in cinematography to history, and an essay about Pierre Lachenay, the main hero of François Truffaut’s La PeauDouce.

Zaal Samadashvili is a master of detail: in the way he reconstrues a whole city through just a few of Tbilisi’s streets, and the times (which are, in actual fact, stopped), or a number of objects, gestures or hues in life, to which he adds a convincing story.

A literary critic has written of this book: ‘This collection is the sort of book which a writer might manage to write if he has a dual attitude to it. On the one hand, he loves things like anyone else, on the other hand, what most people don’t have, is aa knowledge of the book.’