Reading 24 March 2018

GERMAN-GEORGIAN MEETINGS / LUCRECIA515

18:00 Location: Cologne Altes Pfandhaus, Kartäuserwall 20, 50678 Köln, Germany Organizer: Deutscher Pressering e.V Author: Lasha Bugadze
Moderator: Tilo Herde
Publisher: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2017 

‘There is no sex in the Soviet Union’ became a popular slogan in the USSR after a young woman said it during the US-USSR TV bridge show. Sex was a ‘closed’ issue, deeply tabooed at the time, and this inertia continued well into the post-Soviet period. The protagonist of the novel Lucrecia515 is Sandro. He is 37, married and something of a Don Juan. He keeps a conscientious record of his sexual adventures, ranking women according to their looks, peculiarities, nationality and the impression they make on him. He also has an unconventional strategy for making new conquests, repeatedly managing to sneak away from his wife into the company of a wide range of women. But things stop running smoothly when someone hacks into his email and social media accounts. He is a type of a modernized Georgian, a married Don Juan, putting a lot of effort and enthusiasm into making up for the ‘sexless period’. Very similar to Leporello and Don Giovanni, Sandro also keeps a list of women complete with their socio-psychological indications, such as ‘has marriage in mind’, ‘fatally stubborn’, ‘living in the past’, ‘beyond reach for various reasons’, ‘easy to get’, etc. Sandro has a quarter-share in a factory making sauce. He is married, has one child and can play Chopin’s Etude No.3, which he does when he senses that his looks and social status have failed to impress the ‘object of his interest’ (as he sometimes calls the women he courts). His looks, though, are not those of a classic Don Juan: Sandro is more of a ‘civilized Georgian’; he’s not slim, but makes himself look slim if he needs to (for instance, when his photo is taken, he inhales deeply and presses his belly back).