Waiting for the Electricity
Overlook
An exciting and hilarious debut novel a remarkable picaresque set in post Soviet Georgialand of corruption love and power shortages 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 Americaspecifically to utopian San Francisco where the streets are paved with quinoaSlims 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
