A Swedish Novelist Hits New York, With ‘Permission to Be More Wild'
On the surface, he was thriving. He was one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers and playwrights. His last book had been a finalist for a National Book Award. He'd begun a family of his own. And yet he still felt a pall cast by his father, whose long absences during his childhood amounted to a profound, existential taunt.
His father's shadow strangled Khemiri's sense of possibility, and he was desperate to get out from under it. It trailed him as he crisscrossed the world, met his heroes, practiced shaping language into something that resembled his reality. It's not a stretch to say that Khemiri has spent a lifetime thinking about curses — a curse being just 'a story that tries to predict our future,' as he said in an interview.
'The Sisters,' his new novel, out on June 17 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is his attempt to free himself at last. The book follows Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia Mikkola, who grow up around Stockholm in the orbit of an autofictional narrator named Jonas.
Like Jonas (and like Khemiri), the Mikkolas are Swedish Tunisian and grappling with an unwieldy family inheritance of their own: Their mother, a carpet seller, is convinced the family has been cursed, and each sister chooses a vastly different path in the wake of their dysfunctional childhoods.
Anxious and rigid, Ina exhibits classic symptoms of Eldest Daughter Syndrome — and yet she is eminently sympathetic. The beautiful middle sister, Evelyn, mostly drifts until discovering a late-in-life hunger for acting. Anastasia wrestles with deep-seated anger but is changed by a stint studying Arabic in Tunisia, and by a woman she meets there. The Jonas figure of the book first encounters them in adolescence, and nurtures a long fascination with the trio that ends up revealing a connection deeper than he could have imagined.
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