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Georgian love story with real heart
Timeless
By Nicholas Tchkotoua
MOST writers would kill for Nicholas Tchkotoua’s romantic pedigree.
A Georgian prince forced into exile by the Bolshevik invasion in 1921, Tchkotoua loved his homeland so much that he stipulated his heart be buried on its soil when he died.
In 1984 his son had to smuggle his father’s heart back into the country, climb into Tbilisi cemetery and bury it in the family plot under cover of night.
Tchkotoua only wrote one novel, Timeless – a strange love story set in the Caucasus mountains based on his own ill-fated affair with a woman from the other side, a Russian.
The book was all but forgotten until Peter Nasmyth, a writer-turned-publisher from Belsize Park, stumbled upon it two years ago on the groaning shelves of Walden Books, a second-hand bookshop run by David Tobin in Harmood Street.
Nasmyth, who has written several books on Georgia and owns a bookshop in its capital, resolved to publish it. Moreover, he tracked down the author’s son, the heart smuggler, and discovered that everything in the novel, which he had taken as fantasy, was true. The book was primed and ready for publication in Georgia when war broke out with Russia, in an uncanny echo of the novel’s plot, in August 2008.
Concessions had to be made. The launch was put back by a month and moved from Tbilisi to Tbilisi Restaurant in Holloway Road.
Timeless has caught the attention of the western press, who enjoy pointing out the parallels between the central romance and the current political climate. The Russians and Georgians have also flocked to it, though not for the same reasons, says Nasmyth. “They like the love story,” he explains. “They are pretty tired of politics. It’s going to take a few years, but I think their relationship will slowly restore itself, because they are so close.”
Simon Wroe |
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