Me and My Kusturica is a short story collection which was awarded literary award SABA in 2011. The stories included in the collection reflect modern reality and author’s authentic literary vision. Maka Mikeladze is a psychiatrist by profession and this experience greatly assists the author to create extremely convincing characters, and to make the audience emotionally bond with them. In the fictional world by Maka Mikeladze the reader may encounter the man who perpetuates the lie lived by his beloved deceased wife by having the wrong birth year carved on her gravestone, thus obliterating the war; the man with cancer who confesses to a deaf and dumb clergyman his great sorrow at never having been a good singer; the woman from whose head a book grows overnight – sometimes a cheap novel, sometimes a dry economics textbook, depending on the reader … They are almost all naïve protagonists, but people with heart and soul, and Maka Mikeladze describes them with all the emotion that characterizes the figures themselves, in a distinctive and baroque style, with plenty of self-deprecation.


EXTRACT
Translated into English by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field

Dedicated to those who offered support during the days of war

A film director is a human being who creates mirages out of people. He tries to shape the mirages which you like, for example, or those liked by me into mirages which will be liked by somebody else.
A friend is a human being too. She knows much better which mirages I like, in other words, what somebody like me needs, in other words, what I like.
I don’t know how much you like me, but imagine that I am a human being, who according to her own point of view, needs a film director, but from her girlfriend’s point of view, needs a holiday in the mountains of Racha, and get married to a Rachvelian man. As for the film director, he keeps his thoughts to himself.
My girlfriend is an idealist, I am a super-idealist, the film director is realistic. He doesn’t know who I am, and he has no idea what kind of mirage he could create from me. At least, he’s never mentioned it to me or my friend.
The girlfriend is an idealist because she doesn’t understand that there’s not a single Rachvelian man on the planet who would like me and one who would actually marry me, is unlikely ever to be born. I’d need to be at least thirty five kilos heavier to satisfy the typical Rachvelian man’s taste in women. It’s not possible for me to become fair if I was born from my mother’s womb with wheat-coloured skin with a permanent tan on top of it. Also, would an honourable Rachvelian man ever condescend to marry a ‘coal-darky’, a ‘Chiatura darling’ or a ‘monsterette’’? 
But as for the film director, who intends to shoot a psychological thriller, I wouldn’t disappoint him at all with my expression, stretching out my neck, staring nervously.
My idealist girlfriend is an optimist as well. She believed that the area of Racha was my love, my rescuer and saviour. 
Optimism is contagious. A human being is a human being.
Looking for a film director though is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
It would take a small bus load of food, filled up to the top, to host two families in Racha and feed them honourably on Rachvelian speciality ham, Kvanchkara wine and bean pies. A bowl, wooden kneading through, child’s walking harness, hammock... (See PDF)


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