ISBN:

978-9941-458-43-9

Category:

Modern Georgian Prose

Pages:

84

Format:

12.5x17

Cover:

Soft

Price:

7.00

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Psychotropic Fireworks by Beso Papaskua is one of those novels where it is very hard to tell reality from fiction and as it would appear, the author is not at all aiming at this. Like Buddhist legends and Antic Philosophy, among other issues, the book too poses the question whether the universe is actually real or is it only the fruit of our imagination. The novel does not specify the time period of its storyline but we can guess from the hints given by the author that events described in it are from and after the period of the civil war. Regarding the storyline, we can say that the narrator is the character (or characters) who commits a crime on basis of civil opposition and tries to escape the physical universe into the literary one.

 

Many authors like Pirandello or Miguel de Unamuno (Mist) have used a form of narrative where the author and the character interact with each other, and Papaskua uses the same method in his book. At the same time, the novel reminds us of Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep and Jan Komasa's Suicide Room because of its surreality and escapism.

 

The novel stands out for its almost cinematographic visuality so much so that it can be called a sort of "picture-poetry". We rarely find in literature such impressive pictures of was seen through a child's eyes as we have in this novel – poetic and brutal at the same time like it would be in the works of a primitivist painter" –  Gaga Lomidze.