‘These two images, the screen and the spectator, have affected all my way of life, my ‘personal history’, my biography in fact… My spectacles are often smeared with tears, sometimes film heroes make me cry, and sometimes real human beings do: the actual life which for my generation has been hard and, in truth, something to cry about.’ - the author addresses his readers and offers a very sincere story observed through the glasses. Tear-Stained Spectacles is a collection of documentary memories of G. Gvakharia, which include interesting historical materials of Georgian reality starting from early 70s up to 2004. The stories in the book describe the history of a man and a whole country at the same time. Each chapter introduces the most memorable moment from one particular year. Despite the chapters having been written at different times and in various moods and temper, the book is one complete tale of the generation which went to schools after the Khrushchev Thaw, became educated during the Brezhnev age, and started working during Perestroika… Then they disappeared, split, dispersed due to the civil war and a forced migration from their homeland because of a cultural collapse and the rise of pseudo-culture in Georgia. Tear-Stained Spectacles represents the best mix of literature and cinematography. A certain combination of shots gives the book a great cinematic quality. There is everything from crowd shots to brief cutaway cadres which highlight only what is important for the author – a whole gallery of well-known and unknown faces and people who have influenced the author: Alfred Hitchcock and Kurd Ginger Gurama from his neighborhood, Bill Clinton and a popular gypsy Lilia in Tbilisi, Andrei Tarkovsy and Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”.



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