My Soul Twin

Nino Haratischvili

(Scribe, £12.99)

With a loving husband and young son, a job writing for the arts section of a “medium-sized, mediocre” newspaper and a home in a middle-class Hamburg suburb, 36-year-old Stella has found stability and security at long last. But she knows deep down that she’s not a good fit for this kind of life, and when her father’s aunt phones to tell her that her adopted brother, Ivo, has returned after an eight-year absence, Stella realises at once that his arrival will bring it all crashing down.

Now a Hamburg resident herself, but originally from Tbilisi in Georgia, Nino Haratischvili riffs heavily on Wuthering Heights in this novel, which was originally published in 2011 and has now been translated into English following the success of her subsequent book, The Eighth Life.

Like Cathy and Heathcliff, Stella and Ivo were brought together as children, when Stella’s father, Frank, had an affair with Ivo’s mother, Emma. With Emma dead and her husband in prison, Frank ended up adopting Ivo, the two children forming an unbreakable, and toxic, bond. When their mother moved to the US, Stella and her older sister Leni chose to stay with their father in Germany: Leni to punish their mother for leaving, Stella so that she could continue living with Ivo.

To Stella, Ivo is the only person in the world who can speak directly to her soul, unlocking a dark, brooding, tempestuous nature that no one else can reach. Their semi-incestuous love has plunged her life into chaos in the past, and the family worry about the potential consequences of his return. Their fears aren’t misplaced. From the moment Ivo turns up on her doorstep, Stella’s life goes off the rails, jeopardising her marriage, her job and, most importantly, her relationship with her son.

Quite why Ivo, now a war correspondent, has chosen to come back and once more wreak havoc on Stella’s life is unclear at first, but the pair pick up from where they left off, in stolen moments of rough, painful sex invariably followed by Ivo drifting off with a shrug and a cryptic, pseudo-profound remark. In flashbacks, Haratischvili gradually reveals more and more about the sibling-lovers’ history and why the rest of the family are so fearful of them getting back together.

However, exploring both their past and present bogs the narrative down in repetitive cycles of reunions, masochistic couplings and inevitable abandonment, Ivo’s entirely predictable desertions sending Stella back into the doldrums of loneliness and despair, where she bemoans her fate like a drunkenly oversharing friend. It starts to feel as though it’s not just Stella and Ivo who have got themselves stuck in a loop but Haratischvili too.

A change of location and shift in focus, with Stella being persuaded to follow Ivo to Georgia, where he’s pursuing a story, pulls the narrative out of its rut. It’s here, in the final section of the book, where the story gains some forward momentum, and where Ivo’s intentions for Stella are finally revealed.

Even if it does spend much of its length re-treading the same ground, My Soul Twin has an undeniable power and strong ideas. Given its obvious Wuthering Heights inspiration, it reaches gothic levels of emotional angst which, however much they may suit Stella’s tortured, masochistic conception of a relationship and her helplessness in the face of her own overwhelming passions, frequently feel overblown. But, despite its flaws and missteps, it’s still an affecting work, examining love, guilt and overcoming trauma through a couple’s touching need to heal their broken childhood.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT