Fish Letters - Goderdzi Chokheli

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Fish Letters

by
Goderdzi Chokheli

general information | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Fish Letters
Author:	Goderdzi Chokheli
Genre:	Stories
Written:	1986 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	91 pages
Original in:	Georgian
Availability:	Fish Letters - US
	Fish Letters - UK
	Fish Letters - Canada

(and other stories)
Georgian title: თევზის წერილები
Translated by Clifford Marcus, Ollie Matthews, and Walker Thompson
Edited by Lia Chokoshvili
With an Introduction by Geoffrey Gosby
With an Afterword by Ollie Matthews
With four photographs

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Our Assessment:

B+ : small but nicely varied collection

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       Fish Letters is a collection of five stories, basically all set in very rural Georgia, the Gudamaqari Gorge region where author Chokheli was born and grew up.
       The title story sees Gamikhardai punished for not following the local foreman's order to join in with the sheep-shearing and instead going to scythe hay. When the authorities -- this is still in Soviet times -- come to collect their cut of the hay they take twenty-five of his thirty stacks, even though the quota is only fifteen. This is the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back; Gamikhardai lashes out -- and, after taking off all his clothes, walks into the local Aragvi river, and sits down in the middle. And he stays there, refusing to come out, abandoning his family, his community -- and, indeed, humanity in general.
       As Gamikhardai then explains to the narrator -- a writer chronicling local events --:

I used to love people, but I do not love them any longer. I do not love them anymore because I am no longer a man.
I am a fish !
I do not want to have anything at all in common with people anymore.

The 'fish letters' of the title are the correspondence between the narrator and Gamikhardai, who does not waver in his resolve to live on only as a fish. It's simple enough for him:

I want to be a fish.
Things won't work out for me as a fish ? So what ? I will die this way, as I want, as a fish.

The title-character of 'Cipollino' is called the village 'idiot' -- though as the narrator admits: "Poor Cipollino was the sole kind-hearted and noble soul to be found amongst the inhabitants of my village" (where everyone: "had their own nicknames, and none of them was upset by this"). A harmless enough character, Cipollino spends his nights sitting on a viewing platform he had constructed in a favored tree, staring at the stars. A crisis in the village prompts him to take action that, even though it resolves the issue with little real harm, the villagers take issue with: "They regarded his behaviour as a kind of madness passing all limits and sought revenge on him" -- opting for a little more than spiteful act.
'Full Stop and Comma' is a charming little account of this area, the narrator recalling: "Full Stop and Comma, two little girls whose real names nobody seemed to know". They lived in: "small abandoned mountain village", and:

This small village was connected to the world by three threads of hope: the smoke, which wafted lethargically up to the sky; the lights that flickered in the windows at night; and the two little girls, who every morning at dawn set out from the village and with their satchels slung on their backs ran down the slope. The school was very far away. They reached a little grove where the bus stopped, and where they took the bus to school; this bus alone, single-handedly, connected this god-forsaken valley to the outside world.

       The short story concludes with a present-day update, the girls now married. The narrator suggests: "You can picture the scene" and here as throughout, it's the deft little sketches, of character and place, that allow the reader to imagine it.
       'Nine Questions About Love' consists of nine short sections, eight simply dialogue, back-and-forths between someone asking eight different individuals about love and in the final one the narrator reflecting: "Have we learned anything from the previous answers ?"
       The final story, 'The Communal Crow' involves the village priest, who complains that his crow has been taken by some local boys. The local judge is a bit perplexed by the idea of a pet crow -- "What do you mean, your crow ? Are you having me on ?" -- but goes along with handling the case, which soon spirals rather out of control, involving much of the village.
       A slim collection, Fish Letters does offer very nice variety, and there's a great deal of charm to the stories. Things often get -- or are made -- more complex than they need to be by the locals, but a sense of community -- though one that can certainly be hapless or misguided, at times -- remains. There are also independent streaks throughout -- yet there's also a general sense of taking things as they come, not quite resigned to them but accepting that this is the way things are.
       These scenes and stories nicely convey the village life of this place and times -- not completely naturalistically, and yet still convincingly feeling true to life. The Soviet system only comes to the fore occasionally -- in the foreman and other authorities in 'Fish Letters' or the judge in 'The Communal Crow', for example --, but mostly is just another of the world's and life's peculiarities the villagers have to accept and deal with -- a subtly effective way of critiquing it.
       Including also some photographs of the author, as well as an Introduction and Afterword situating the author and the locale, Fish Letters is a well-presented little volume of stories by a talented writer.

- M.A.Orthofer, 11 July 2025

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Links:

Fish Letters:

Dedalus publicity page

Other books by Goderdzi Chokheli under review:

Human Sadness

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Georgian literature
See Index of literature from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union

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About the Author:

Georgian author and film director Goderdzi Chokheli (გოდერძი ჩოხელი) lived 1954 to 2007.

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