A Faust for the post-Soviet era, Peter Zhghenti is a writer and a translator, living in Georgia and dealing with his own Mephistopheles in the form of Writing itself, which has taken the form of the Phantom of the Opera. Bargaining for his soul, and by extension the soul of a nation now weathering the storm of globalization, Zhghenti soon finds his life contaminated by figures and incidents out of the classics of Eastern and Western literature, as much the political and social realities of his everyday life. A postmodern watershed in Georgian fiction, <em>Wine-dark Sea</em> follows in the tradition of such novels as <em>Mulligan Stew</em> and <em>At Swim-Two-Birds</em>, while blazing a trail of its own.