Raisin Stories gathers together 13 of Maka Ldokonen’s stories, in which every feeling involves love, everything is good and ‘everything is in its place’. Here we have stories with strange names, invented colours and words, yet they are basically genuine Tbilisi stories. The author tells us if a specific district, namely Sololaki, at a specific time. She tells us all about the building of a bourgeois city and about the unique architecture of the old buildings. Nevertheless, there are also very different, invented stories in the collection, which are imbued with love of the orient, which leave a sweet taste in the reader’s mouth and fill one with the scents of childhood, make one believe in Santa Claus and send one looking for presents under the Yule tree.

Whom will you meet here for the last time? bustling, loving families outside the windows, girls longing to get married, Lalo carefully stepping out for a walk with her light-hearted desires, an elderly cinema enthusiast, youths intoxicated with absinthe, dumbstruck by the sight of the first motor-car. You stroll in a city, stirred up by a presidential visit, and you follow a graphomaniac who has cut himself to mark Halloween. What is more important, the author gives us psychological portraits of young people who were born in the USSR in the 1970s and who were caught up in the 1990s struggle for independence.

‘Today it is hard to say whether a Finnish grandfather reading „The Knight in the Panther Skin“ in Georgian, or having Georgian ancestors on her maternal side is the reason, but the fact remains that Maka Ldokonen’s stories are distinguished, above all, by their extraordinary Georgian language. The most significant defect of modern writing is, in fact, its impoverished and over-simplified vocabulary: it seems to me to be made up of one intonation and, given this fact, it is cause for joy that Maka’s stories are marked by their very varied linguistic and stylistic searches. Here, so many layers of literary Georgian and of regional dialects are used, and the narrative language explores so many registers of the literary language, and in such a masterly way, that Ldokonen’s prose, in this respect gives one great aesthetic pleasure.’  

Giorgi Lobjanidze, poet, literary critic, Radio Liberty

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