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Summary
Summary
A modern-day Wuthering Heightsfrom the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life.
Two families, one devastating secret, and an epic story of forbidden love.
Eight years have passed since Stella last saw Ivo, but when he returns, the reunion of their unconventional family will change the course of her ordinary life. As children, Stella and Ivo grew close as their parents embarked on an affair that would shatter both families. Later, as teenagers, their own relationship would be the cause of further scandal. Now, as adults, they set out on an odyssey to uncover the truth about another family's past, and to understand their own.
My Soul Twinis an intense love story about forbidden desire, the ties that bind us, and whether we can ever truly forget what we leave behind.
Author Notes
Nino Haratischvili (Author)
Nino Haratischvili was born in Georgia in 1983, and is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. At home in two different worlds, each with their own language, she has been writing in both German and Georgian since the age of twelve. In 2010, her debut novel Juja was nominated for the German Book Prize, as was her most recent Die Katze und der General in 2018. In its German edition, The Eighth Life was a bestseller, and won the Anna Seghers Prize, the Lessing Prize Stipend, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize 2018. It is being translated into many languages, and has already been a major bestseller on publication in Holland, Poland, and Georgia.
Charlotte Collins (Translator)
Charlotte Collins studied English Literature at Cambridge University and worked as an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the UK before becoming a literary translator. Her co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of Nino Haratischvili'sThe Eighth Life won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut's Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life. Other translations include Seethaler's The Tobacconist, Homeland by Walter Kempowski, and Olga by Bernhard Schlink.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Haratischvili (The Eighth Life) delivers an uneven tale of a German man and woman, raised as siblings, who fight a destructive mutual attraction. Stella and Ivo meet as young children in the 1980s when Stella's father, Frank, and Ivo's mother, Emma, have an extramarital affair. After Emma dies in events that are only fully revealed later, Frank's marriage and mental health collapse, and Stella and Ivo are raised by Frank's aunt Tulia. As teens, Stella and Ivo's tumultuous sexual relationship adds to the chaos of their adolescence. They take other lovers as they become adults, but are unable to separate fully or to build a stable life together. Ivo, who becomes a successful journalist, avoids Stella for eight years, and she marries and has a son. When they're in their mid 30s, he reappears and asks her to travel with him to Eastern Europe for reasons he won't fully explain. Though he claims it will be a healing journey, Stella isn't sure. Stella's talky, overwrought narration and the late foray into the past involving a tangentially related Georgian family blunt the novel's power. Despite an intriguing Wuthering Heights--inflected premise, the story never gels. (Dec.)
Guardian Review
The overseas success of Georgian-German novelist Nino Haratischvili's 900-page epic The Eighth Life (2019), which followed a single Georgian family through the tumult of the 20th century, has prompted the translation of this shorter, more intimate 2011 novel about an on-off sexual relationship between two adoptive siblings. Set largely in Hamburg, it's narrated by 36-year-old Stella, a slipshod journalist at "a medium-sized, mediocre newspaper" whose editor promises to put her in charge of the culture section if she can focus. But work - not to mention her husband and six-year-old son - soon go by the wayside when her ex-lover, Ivo, a war reporter raised as her brother, arrives in town after eight years incommunicado. Haratischvili's scenario will appeal to fans of Leïla Slimani's Adèle, which also involves a half-arsed hack whose clandestine sex life brings release from domestic and professional obligations. Stella's appeal as a narrator rests on her chilly blasts of ennui. Here she is on her sister, a children's author: "I found the staid conventionality she radiated almost intolerable." And her husband, Mark, an award-winning documentary-maker? "I hated him for¿ his sympathetic manner, his strong sense of responsibility, his blamelessness." When he serves wine in crystal glasses, she tells us damningly that he "always fetched these glasses with a view to us having special sex later on". Stella mixes her frank account of the to-do stirred up by Ivo's return - hotel-room assignations, missed school pick-ups, a him-or-me ultimatum from Mark - with the story of how she and Ivo grew up together after her philandering father slept with his mother. But as we yo-yo between time frames to see the fallout from their adolescent lust, Stella tiptoes teasingly around more deeply buried secrets, not least her part in the tragedy that first brought Ivo into her family. While the novel's sexual voltage buoys you through its twists and turns, Haratischvili isn't out only to portray middle-class marital and maternal strife. When Ivo urges Stella to join him on assignment to the Caucasus with an exiled musician he got to know in New York, the jolting gear shift into geopolitical drama crams practically another novel's worth of characters into a quarter of the book's length. For readers of The Eighth Life, it's a return to expected turf, but it also feels like authorial bet-hedging about where the story's strengths lie.
Library Journal Review
In this follow-up to Georgia-born, Germany-based Haratischvili's multi-award-winning The Eighth Life, Stella lives a charmed life in Hamburg, Germany: her documentary filmmaker husband is handsome and supportive, her six-year-old son is precocious and engaged, and she is a successful writer for a small magazine. But her carefully constructed world falls apart when her adoptive brother, Ivo, reappears after an eight-year absence. Many years ago, Ivo came to live with Stella's family after his mother died and his father was imprisoned. As it turns out, Stella's father was having an affair with Ivo's mother. As events escalated, Stella's mother was forced to move to the United States, leaving Stella and her sister with their father's aunt, and Ivo's reappearance reignites this past history and trauma. Stella leaves her husband and son and travels to Tbilisi, Georgia, to be with Ivo while he is on assignment as a freelance reporter. In contrast to Hamburg's gloominess and dampness, Georgia is hot, dangerous, and vital. VERDICT In this fraught tale of how the sins of the parents haunt and punish their offspring, the tension and sadness are almost too much to bear. Billed as a modern-day Wuthering Heights.--Jacqueline Snider
