A book about young people in seaside Batumi “can only be boring” (53), an intoxicated informant complains, during an outing to a seedy and dangerous city district. This illustrates the paradox at the book's heart—the legacy of insecurity and criminality (the “transitional” past of pre-Saakashvili Georgia), set against the stultifying and stagnating present (a “groundhog day” for many, 80).
Martin Frederiksen, in a sensitive and wide-ranging study, summons the spirits of bored and frustrated young men in a society suspended between the past and an illusory bright future, post-Rose Revolution. Batumi's déclassé and infantilized youth drink, quaff ersatz “drugs,” masturbate in claustrophobic parental homes, and half-heartedly learn English. They walk the city endlessly for lack of other occupation.
Transition “lingers”: poverty, unrealized opportunities, violence, unavoidable petty crime, and the “narco-baron” (54) Alsan Abashidze (Ajarian leader, 1991–2004). From the future loom unrealistic personal fantasies of fame and fortune. Mikheil Saakashvili's promises ring hollow in empty lives. “Overwriting” of the Soviet past and of transition is mainly visible in the pointless urban fountains built by “King Fountain the First”—a local moniker for Saakashvili (166).
The book has four sections. The first section examines youth's public roaming—punctuated by ruin, superficial renewal, and seasonal lassitude (in winter Batumi is “lazy town,” 92)—their social networks and imbrications with criminality. The second section explores youth's longing for an unobtainable future, their present saturated with dreams and nightmares and an imaginative layer of the present. The third section explores youth's “neither being nor becoming” (133)—how unwanted expectations of the future haunt the present. The final section argues for the importance of the ongoing temporal marginality in post-socialism, and against “posting” transition just yet.
The book examines friendship relations among men as dzmak'atsebi “(brother-men”), these compensate emasculating marginalization that is more than just the result of unemployment. Dzmak'atsebi is characterized by “honor”-friendship, appropriate masculinity, and mutual moral regard. Yet, like so many other practices: drug-use, language learning, this involves “mimicry” (of the “thieves-in-law” tradition). Frederiksen shows that like the veneer of toughness encountered, Georgian society as a whole suffers from the “Potemkin village” syndrome: Saakashvili's reforms are a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The chief merit of the book lies in its balanced rhythm: evocative ethnographic moments of immediacy in field-note style (printed in italics) contrast with more reflective and contextualizing material. This co-presence comes with original application of theoretical literature from cultural and area studies, and anthropology. However, the very evocativeness of place and person sometimes sets up a barrier between reader and subject (the young men). The elegance of Frederiksen's writing and impressive theoretical tool box threatens to crowd out informants' inner life. Something of a distance remains between the researcher and researched. This is highlighted by some of the narrative language used. There is a lot of third person in the past, such as, “he suggested that we go down to the beach … [and] explained that he was feeling increasingly lonely” (50). This reportage style is perhaps because, as Frederiksen notes, at the time of the fieldwork he was developing his language skills as he went along (there are a few mistakes in Russian that illustrate this). As a result, a kind of hazy veil intervenes between readers and the dispossessed young men like Emil. On the other hand, this distance becomes emblematic of one of the main points of the book—the feeling of being “out of joint” with space and time as an uncommunicable experience. “Marginalization” is performed in the very ethnography itself—these men's inner workings and tumultuous emotional lives are often inaccessible even to the sympathetic researcher who endlessly hangs around with them, drinking beer, sweating in airless apartments, mindlessly throwing stones into the sea. What we do learn—about the men's drug use, borderline mental disorders, endless illness, and extremely precarious lives—makes this kind of study all the more remarkable and impressive as a research achievement. In this sense, Frederiksen makes a contribution to the global youth studies of the marginalized and sets down a marker to area studies practitioners to engage much more closely with the second generation of the “losers” of transition. How does one research a generation and group living a “social afterlife” (15), characterized by boredom and inertia?
