Juja is beautifully written, a powerful story of love, womanhood and grief. I did find it a little too fragmented at times, with all the POVs and jumping back and forth in time and perspective. It does all come together though as the novel progresses, and culminates in a surprising and satisfying ending. I am a huge fan of Haratischvili's style and character-building, and am very happy to be able to finally appreciate this debut work!

The Eighth Life is one of the most exquisite books I have ever read, and sadly I have not read anything of the same ilk by this writer since. The characters were everything those in the Eighth Life were not; two dimensional, remotely likeable and understandable. Beautiful prose, however

Juja was an interesting concept however it failed to grasp me as much as I wanted it to. I think the thing that caused the disconnect is that I felt the characters didn;t have the most distinctive voices - they felt slightly interchangeable. I'm not sure if I am the target demographic perhaps, it wasn't unenjoyable but I was a bit lost.

It was not easy to read the book. Different story lines, different times, many characters with different problems. I constantly was confused what everything is about.

First of all I want to say thank you to Netgalley and the publishers as I received an advanced reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review.

I was looking forward to this book but found it quite complex and confusing in some parts which made it difficult for me to keep my attention and become invested.

The book is a collection of (seemingly) unconnected narratives of (mostly) women struggling with the circumstances of their lives, across 6 decades. The episodes describe deep emotional pain, but highlight the universality of it across generations, countries, and circumstances. The book is gut-wrenching at times, very raw emotionality, and visceral sex scenes.

What I liked about the book was the neat way the narrative wove the loose threads into one single story of pain, while being ambiguous as to the need to have an origin to that pain, and the important (of lack thereof) of its veracity or its gender. The pain in this story is truly universal, and the ability of women to deal with it is what separates them from each other, rather than the pain itself. This was done with finesse and care, and was the highlight of the story.

That being said, overall, I disliked the book. First, it was too angry. No worries about being angry, and perhaps it's my own fault for not seeing the true nature of the horror of being a woman, but - I choose to think about life in a different way (even though I'm not a woman, naturally). I think there is a lot of beauty, and a lot to celebrate, and the fight is worth fighting, for improving women's perceptions by society, of by themselves.

Secondly, I found the lack of love and positivity in this story truly perplexing. Each sex scene was angry and horrid, and based on lust (at best) or hate (at worst). What about sex for love? For affection? For togetherness? It just made me disappointed that the author didn't feel it was important enough to describe that aspect of a woman's life, or of a man's (for that matter), as a balancing act.

Lastly, it was way too convoluted and complex in its structure. It felt like a math equation written to impress, more than a literary narrative intended to provoke thought and elicit aesthetic pleasure. The author is clearly talented, but comes across as a bit insecure in her writing, without letting go and just writing nice prose.

I would not recommend it frankly, unless perhaps if you're furiously in pain. I can't even say it's good feminist literature - because it lacks the beauty of womanhood (and humanity, more broadly).

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of the book in return for an honest review.

Ok... What to say about this book? It's a ride! At times I loved it at times I hated it. It's ambiguous, poetic, raw and atmospheric. At times hard to understand, at times illuminating with truth. It's about depression, grief, loss, suicide and loneliness. It's about trying to find meaning in the meaningless. It's about how art and literature can speak into pain like nothing else. Can't say I'm anyway near clever enough to understand it all but I found it compulsive reading all the same and it will stay with me.
This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

3.5 stars

Honestly it must be difficult when your magnum opus is published in English first and all your English-speaking audience is expecting is another Eighth Life 😂 I was sort of disappointed in Haratischwili’s second English translation, My Soul Twin, but Juja fared better. This is her debut novel in fact, and I think, depressing as it is, it’s a solid debut though not without a few weaknesses.
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Translated again by Ruth Martin, Juja is told through a variety of perspectives. At its centre is a mysterious little book, written by 17-year-old Jeanne Saré whose tragic suicide then inspired 14 copycats after reading her book Ice Age. The main POVs are ‘Brother’, a vile little man half in love with his own sister, and Laura, a Dutch academic who is semi-coerced into embarking upon a research project focusing on Saré.
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It goes without saying that Juja is filled with awful acts, it’s bleak and explores the darkest recesses of the human mind. The first half of the book was a lot stronger than the second. Sometimes a couple of the POVs felt difficult to distinguish. Their voices felt too similar, and I suppose that may be down to the fact that all of them are experiencing terrible sadnesses. I was definitely intrigued throughout, and was keen to know how all the storylines would come together - which some did more satisfyingly than others.
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Juja is an exploration of the power of storytellings, the idea of myth and finding what we want to find in the literature we consume. The characters are all battling their own demons, and I think their stories are well-developed on their own, but the book stumbles when it comes to tying them together. The mysterious draw of the book, its effect on its readers and the legend of Saré was what I found most compelling.
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Book 4 for #WomenInTranslation month

Trigger Warnings: alcoholism, infant death, stillbirth, suicide, self-harm, rape

In Nino Haratischvili’s Juja, a little book written by a 17-year-old girl in the 50s marks the destinies of its readers decades after its author’s death. It is commonplace for a reader to see and to seek themselves in the characters they are reading about. Such is also the case for the vast array of characters in Juja, as the novel explores the relationship between fiction and its reader, and the role of the author.

Told from multiple perspectives, in vignettes that span four decades and three continents, the characters in Juja have two things in common: unhappiness, and Ice Age, the little book written by Jeanne Saré. Like Tolstoy, Nino Haratischvili allows each of her characters to be unhappy in their own way, dealing with grief, breakups, disillusionment, anger, mental health struggles.

But neither the themes nor the characters feel unique enough, or developed enough, for the novel to stand out. It is the mystery element surrounding the Ice Age and its author that makes Juja an entertaining book. And while the chapters feel too short, and the characters too many to allow the reader to get to know them, the vignettes promote a fast-paced narrative that keeps you reading.

Little is known about the Ice Age and its author. The book was written in the 50s on a school exercise book. Its author, a teenage girl named Saré, killed herself at 17, after finishing writing. The book ended up being published in the 80s, inspiring a string of copy-cat suicides. Then, in the early 2000s, years after the book went out of print, an Art History professor from Amsterdam, joined by her student, and a woman from Sydney, come across this book and go on separate investigations to uncover who Saré was, and what prompted the series of suicides.

Ice Age is meant to be the recorded thoughts of someone experiencing the Apocalypse, someone that is pure anger and disillusionment. Its great quality, according to Haratischvili’s characters, is that it doesn’t communicate anything on its own, but instead it reflects back to the reader whatever the reader needs to be reflected back. That is what draws them, each in their own unhappiness, to Saré’s little novel. But the character’s fascination and praise for this book failed to pass on to me, the reader of Juja. Ice Age read like nothing more than the ramblings of a teenager who’s angry with the world and thinks themselves a poet – so not even an outlandish kind of teenager. In this sense, some of the character’s motivations felt thin.

The novel ends with more questions, to which each and every reader should give themselves the answers – if there is an answer. It is an ode to books and stories, and their power to change our lives; but it is a warning too, that one shall not take fiction much too seriously.

Based on a true story, Juja is the debut novel of Nino Haratischwili, a Georgian-born German novelist, playwright and theatre director, and poses the question of authenticity as we follow the mythos of a particular tome and attempt to find traces of a person who may or may not have existed. Loosely based on the real-life case of Danielle Sarréra, a French author who committed suicide in 1949, at the age of seventeen, and whose writings were only discovered and first published in the mid-1970s; in fact, the works of 'Danielle Sarréra' were those of Frédérick Tristan (the 1983 prix Goncourt winner), and she a figure -- like her work -- entirely of his invention. Juja proposes a similar author, named Jeanne Saré, also lost to suicide at age seventeen, and her oeuvre -- a single volume in this case, called Die Eiszeit, Buch 1 (Ice Age, Vol. 1 in English translation -- one of the characters buys a copy), written in 1953 and then published by an underground publisher who discovered the texts some fifteen or twenty years later. The work is infamous for having led fourteen young women to follow the author's example and commit suicide in the six years following its publication. After multiple re-printings, the book has been allowed to fade from memory -- but the fallout lingers, not least in used copies that readers still stumble across.

Juja is presented in concise chapters, some of which consist of excerpts from Saré's work, while others describe various characters whose lives are somehow affected by it over the decades. There is the young student, Jan, who convinces an academic, Laura, to join him in searching for the truth about Saré and her work in 2004. There is Patrice Duchamp, the young writer just starting out in 1967 - and the original publisher of Ice Age and the young woman he becomes involved with, Marie Bessonville. And there are several women who read the text and are consumed by it -- one copies the entire text, for example; another, whose life has been marked by the most horrible domestic tragedy, feels like she's reading her own thoughts when she stumbles across the book. When Laura and Jan travel to Paris and begin to diligently investigate, they discover that there isn't any record of any Saré, or any suicide matching her description in the relevant period. Is her work entirely the invention of Patrice Dechamp? It would seem so -- but somehow it's not entirely that clear-cut. And there is the mysterious word: 'Distraction' scratched into a wall, supposedly by a young Saré-like woman, sometime around the time she would have lived -- a word that doesn't appear in Ice Age but becomes totemic for some of its readers. What is the truth?

This is an addictive, wholly original and wonderfully complex novel about the power of legends and stories to endure for time immemorial and their influence upon readers. The sense of mystery and profound intrigue that pervades each page remains alive right through until the denouement and creates a palpable sense of suspense which implores you to both read faster in order to discover the answers and slower to savour the experience of the finely wrought written word. It is completely different to anything I have read in a few years and is stylistically quite challenging, as you are thrown into a story that seems to consist of many fragments. It can be disturbing, depressing and deliberately confusing, but once you've gotten yourself into this book, you're all too eager to untangle all the threads and follow their paths carefully. Filled with melancholia and plenty of soul searching, the tale is a touching and haunting one and the eddy of profound loneliness that envelops Saré and many of the other characters only serves to pull you into the story more. There is also plenty of room for interpretation between mythological figures, apocalyptic descriptions and avant-garde metaphors, but at the end of the day it is a book about the great search for the meaning of one's own existence.

A really intriguing novel, such an intelligent and wild ride. I felt a little overwhelmed at times but perhaps a reread would show a bit more clarity to me.
Very well translated

Haratischvili creates a world shared by a group of people over different times, a world rather sad and despairing which attracts desolate characters who have lost their way and see only a wall in front of them. At certain times the characters become almost interchangeable, they were deep in their despair and it seem that their thoughts were very similar to each other. Maybe it was that that drew them to the book which was the fulcrum of the story. It might be as well they the book found them in a particular moment in their lives where it could imprint itself on them and direct their thoughts to their sad downfall.

I was happily onboard in the first third, like the result in the second third and did not enjoy the last third. I would say that the promise shown in the outline of the story was not fully delivered to me or else I was not at home to receive it.

An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley

I am very aware that some reviewers appear to have a different relationship to this book and to Nino Haratischvili's work but for me there were maybe a few parts around the halfway mark that held my interest otherwise I found it confusing, quite mad in parts and somewhat incomprehensible in others.

I could barely keep up with who the characters all were as they all appeared to be different parts of the same person and all of them were miserable and wallowing in their sadness.

I understand the complexity of this novel and understand it has to be that way but my mother would have put it succinctly - they need to get out, get some fresh air and stop living in their own heads. I'd have to say I found all the characters unlikeable and at least one of them was loathsome. I didn't care about what had happened to them or the action they might take having been persuaded by a book to kill themselves.

I was glad to have finished it but it definitely gave me a headache. The second star is for the small amounts that made some sense to me. Not for me. Too introspective.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance review copy.