Waiting for the Electricity: A Novel - Hardcover

Nichol, Christina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468306863 ISBN 13: 9781468306866

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2014

Synopsis

In the republic of Georgia, the Communists are long gone, replaced by . . . well, by what? Something much more confusing. There are no jobs in the cities. And when there are jobs, employees aren’t compensated. And when they are compensated, it’s because the jobs are . . . not strictly scrupulous. In the village, life goes on much as it always did, but these days, the homemade farmers cheese is giving way to the oil pipeline. And as for romance in this strange, confounding modern age . . . the less said, the better. But there’s one man in Georgia who remains unseduced by corruption, unfazed by nostalgia, and unable to abandon chivalry, no matter how antiquated a notion it may be. This man is Slims Achmed Makashvili, a humble maritime lawyer and the hero of this brilliant novel. When Slims discovers an application for an American small business internship program sponsored by Hillary Clinton, he knows that he has found his calling. In his letters to Senator Clinton, Slims dreams of bringing efficiency, opportunity, and the American dream to his homeland, even as his friends and relatives embrace decadence, lethargy, and a staggering array of unsavory business practices. But when he finally gets to America―specifically to utopian San Francisco, where the streets are paved with quinoa―Slims sees what reform and progress look like up close. And suddenly, his loud, bickering family and his anguished, joyful country no longer seem so grim. A gleeful picaresque, a visionary satire, and a work of extraordinary empathy and imagination, Waiting for the Electricity is a marvelously imaginative debut novel.

About this title

About the Author

Christina Nichol is a 2012 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Nichol grew up in the Bay Area, studied at the University of Oregon, and received her MFA from the University of Florida. She has traveled widely, worked for nonprofit film companies, and taught English in India, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and, of course, Georgia. Her work has been published in Harper's, Guernica and Lucky Peach. Waiting for the Electricity is her first book.

Review

A Wall Street Journal Best Fiction Book of 2014!

"Like Kingsley Amis with a social conscience, Christina Nichol combines an ear for the absurdities of globalized English with an acute awareness of the everyday sufferings and indignities of daily life in post-Soviet Georgia. The result is a pitch-perfect dark comedy that tracks the myriad miscommunications among ‘global partners’ and next-door neighbors and combines them into one of the most powerful novels yet written on the effects of globalization.” —Marco Roth, author of The Scientists

“This book is a triumphant, sustained, comic performance. I can’t recall a contemporary American novel anywhere near as funny. Be aware that Waiting for Electricity is defiantly un-PC, and also that it manages to provide between the lines as acute and mordant a reading of post-Communist Georgia as one could conceive. The narrator’s letters to Hillary Clinton are more brilliantly hapless than any of Herzog’s to his famous addressees. I got a kind of joy from experiencing Christina Nichol’s transformation of an extreme reality into further documentation of the human comedy. I don’t think I’ve ever before used the word “joy” in quite this way.” —Norman Rush, author of Subtle Bodies

“A wise, funny debut novel that finds endless entertainment in cultural differences and clashing personality types . . . Nichol writes with sharp, knowing exactitude of both Georgia (where she once taught English) and her native Bay Area, and though Makashvili is a figure of jape and jest, he’s by no means a caricature. Indeed, he’s one of the most fully realized characters in recent memory, and readers will take much pleasure in going along on his adventures—and misadventures.” —Kirkus Reviews

"This indeventive debut novel from Nichol, who has taught English in the Republic of Georgia, where the book is set, provides a satirical but good-natured look at the clash between American and Georgian attitudes . . . Tongue-in-cheek humor and Slims's deadpan narration of his improbable tale add considerable appeal to this promising first novel." —Publishers Weekly

"Nichol’s clever debut is rich in cultural commentary . . . Nichol’s well-drawn characters and satirical flourishes make Slims’ journey and interactions both enjoyable and thoughtful." —Booklist

"Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces." —Jill Ciment, author of Heroic Measures 
 
"Waiting for the Electricity is not just a wise, funny, moving novel but a feat of extraordinary literary ventriloquism. In these pages, the American writer Christina Nichol becomes the Georgian "Slims" Achmed. Her Georgia is his Georgia. More remarkably, his America is her America. A fine debut, and a welcome antidote to the provincialism of so much recent American fiction."—David Leavitt, author of The Two Hotel Francforts

"Endearing and dryly hilarious." —The Wall Street Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1468306863
• ISBN 13: 9781468306866
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336