03/10/2014
This inventive debut 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. Slims Achmed Makashvili, a self-effacing attorney working in the Georgian Maritime Ministry of Law, lives in Batumi, a small town on the Black Sea. Bemoaning the deplorable condition of post-Soviet Georgia, where corruption is rife and electricity scarce, Slims enters a business-proposal-writing contest sponsored by Hillary Clinton to teach citizens of former U.S.S.R. satellite states about free-market capitalism. He submits his application with help from his sister, Juliet, who teaches English at a local university, and is surprised to be informed afterward by the American embassy that he has won entry to a six-week internship in San Francisco, which involves attending an economic conference. While staying with his American host, small business owner Merrick, Slims is impressed by the law and order he observes, as well as by the abundance of electricity. He comes up with a dubious business plan for importing Georgian sheep to the U.S. before embarking on a madcap road trip that brings his stay to an ignominious end. Tongue-in-cheek humor and Slims’s deadpan narration of his improbable tale add considerable appeal to this promising first novel. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Skolnick Literary. (June)
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
Endearing and dryly hilarious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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★ 2014-05-22
A wise, funny debut novel that finds endless entertainment in cultural differences and clashing personality types. Part Candide, part Zorba, Slims Achmed Makashvili is a maritime lawyer in the mountainous nation of Georgia, where, as Nichol’s picaresque yarn opens, it is the last day of summer, when “everyone was trying to blacken their bodies before the weather changed.” Makashvili, though, has other things than beachgoing and the impending winter on his mind. Tired of living in a country where electrical power can’t be taken for granted, but still proud of living in a town that “looks like chipped paint,” he’s gotten wind of a U.S. State Department grant program designed to teach third-world types about the virtues of capitalism. He sends off a carefully written letter to Hillary Clinton, exulting, “As You can see, Batumi offers You and Your country great business opportunity!” In return, he wins a slot in an internship program in San Francisco, where he puts his avid mind to work concocting wild schemes to enliven his country’s livestock industry; writing to excuse himself from work one day, for instance, he avers that he’s never sick at home because “we always drink the milk of the sheep,” though, in an aside to readers, he allows that it was really the milk of the goat: “But, as I learned, it is okay to lie in a commercial.” Makashvili is well-meaning and honest, but he can’t help but get into Borat-like mischief, and his stay in the golden land of America—which, he has discerned, isn’t quite so golden after all—doesn’t end well. 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.
