The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili
Review by Rachel Farmer
‘If climbing the spiral staircase transports Lela to a fantasy world, running onto the pear field fills her with terror, the fear that she might not make it across, as she imagines the branches taking hold, throwing her onto the ground, pulling her body into the soft boggy soil, the roots snaking around her and swallowing her up forever.’
This ever-present foreboding looms large in The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili, translated from Georgian by Elizabeth Heighway. Set in a Residential School for Intellectually Disabled Children (or the “‘chool for Idiots’ as the neighbours call it) in post-Soviet Georgia, this novel is the latest in the thematically linked ‘Closed Universe’ series from Peirene Press, which consists of three standalone novels exploring ideas of isolation and introspection. The children at the school—and our protagonist, Lela—do not experience complete physical solitude, but they are nonetheless isolated from the world that has left them behind. The children live out a cloistered existence festering with abuse and neglect, fenced in on the one hand by their remote location and the eponymous pear field, and on the other by their own fears and society’s thoughtless dismissal of their worth.
The absolute power wielded by the adults over the children they should be protecting wreaks havoc time and time again. In the very first pages of the novel, a young boy from the school is knocked down and killed by a car while on an errand for one of the teachers—a fact the teacher hastens to cover up, citing the child’s unruly behaviour as the cause of his demise. Lela covers for her teacher without hesitation. Here, we are introduced to the school’s warped internal logic, valuing face-saving over respect for a dead child, and the others’ tacit acceptance of the way things have always been for them. Being trapped in this insular world even causes Lela to doubt her own mind, as well as the memories that forged her fierce desire to murder one of her teachers: ‘When Lela looks at him now she sometimes thinks maybe it never happened, maybe that Vano only existed in her nightmares.’
While the events of the story are viewed from Lela’s perspective, her thoughts and emotions are strangely absent. We know she burns with a raging desire to kill her teacher; we know she reacts angrily, sometimes with physical violence, to others around her whom she appears to love; we know she does everything in her power to help her young friend, Irakli, escape to a better life. But her thought-processes, her innermost emotions, are denied to us. As reams of hardships and injustices are laid out on the page, we observe Lela’s responses from afar, as detached onlookers, wilfully denied access to her thoughts in an act of self-preservation.
In The Pear Field, Ekvtimishvili offers a clear-sighted view of a place the world forgot, and a group of abandoned children in desperate need of protection. The matter-of-fact prose style belies the heart-rending, often shocking events of the story, mirroring Lena’s resigned acceptance of the only world she has ever known. This novel thrums with a calm assurance, crafted with precision and quiet mastery. The writing is smooth and supple, and the characters are painted with authenticity and tenderness. Peirene has made an excellent choice of final book to wrap up their 2020 releases.
The Pear Field is published by Peirene Press, 30th October 2020