The Devil's Wheel (Чертово колесо)
by Mihail Gigolashvili
Synopsis
The Devil’s Wheel, the author’s second novel, is a requiem for the Soviet Union. It is an expertly constructed novel densely populated with perestroika-era characters, focusing on heroin addicts and corrupt cops in Tbilisi, Georgia. Though the action takes place over a relatively short period in 1987, Gigolashvili fills his book with so many storylines and vivid details that it becomes a voyeuristic epic about drug addiction as a way of life. The Devil’s Wheel is an exceptionally readable novel that combines suspense, social commentary and lifelike characters in the Russian literary tradition.
Drug addiction and the horrors of withdrawal connect nearly everyone in the story, with drugs serving as a metaphor for the attachment to and loss of certain pre-Gorbachev Soviet comforts, many of dubious value. Addicts bemoan the loss of cheap drugs. Those for whom bribery is a way of life complain it’s no longer clear whom or how to pay. The cops gripe, too, and quote Stalin while charging high prices to free criminals.
The literary universe created by Gigolashvili is a dark one, as the author examines Dostoevskian questions about God and what happens when everything’s permitted. Much of the darkness is based in existential questions: Opium becomes a religion to the addicts who plan their squalid days around cooking and shooting up the drug.