Two weeks ago, I had knee replacement surgery, so my posting will be limited through the rest of the month. Here’s a great big book to hold you over in the interim. Meanwhile, happy holidays – yes, all of them…..Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, etc. See you in 2026!

The Sisters, by Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri, now living in Brooklyn, is his first book in English. It is a 638-page master class in structuring a novel. It’s also a dual family saga, the first family featuring very different sisters (Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia) and their unconventional Tunisia-born mother, married to a  Swedish father, who, we learn, has died of cancer. The other family comprises a “normal” Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, who has abandoned his family to return to Tunisia, leaving behind three sons, the oldest named Jonas Khemiri. Yes, this fiction is informed by the author’s own life.

Both families are living in Sweden but have roots in Tunisia, so it’s also an immigrant story. The focus shifts back and forth between the two different families. The reader learns to differentiate the two because one is told in the first person by Jonas, and the other family’s stories are in the third person, with the perspective shifting among the three Mikkola sisters, Ina, 24,  Evelyn, 21 and Anastasia, 19.

The structure of the novel is stunning. It has 150 chapters, longer in the beginning, shorter toward the end. The chapters are aggregated in separate sections or books. The first book covers the year 2000; the next six chapters cover ever-shortening chunks of time, the last covering one minute in the year 2035.  Don’t bother memorizing this. Just know that the author wants to convey the passage of time being slower at the beginning and speeding up as one gets older. In the process, the reader is sucked into the narrative, gathering more and more information and figuring out the mystery of how these two families are linked.

The Mikkola sisters’ mother seems to be bipolar (never specified), and is frenetic, disorganized and unstable.  She has moved her daughters from one place to another, earning her living in sometimes questionable ways and also by selling handwoven carpets. Daughter Ina is super-organized, methodical and responsible. It is she who brings up her sisters, often to the point of being over-protective and controlling.

As the reader is drawn in, it becomes clear that Jonas, the primary character in the Khemiri family, a fictional proxy for the author, who is also part Swedish and part Tunisian. The Khemiri mother is more traditional, holding the family together despite the absence of the Tunisia-born father, who disappears and reappears only to be fault-finding and judgmental toward his elder son.  

Turns out, there are connections between Jonas and the Mikkola sisters and hints of a past relationship between Jonas’s father and the Mikkola sisters’ mother. Cue the mystery music. Will the reader ever figure out the threads of this woven tapestry of life?

The thread of the story is a curse on the Mikkola family that extends beyond the mother and sisters. The themes involve sibling relationships, absentee parents, abusive parents, adolescent insecurity, search for identity, obsession, depression, immigrant struggles and finding one’s way in the world.

This book may not be for everyone. The Sisters can be a challenge. As an old English major, I was intrigued and lured on by the gradual revelations of these intriguing characters, with growing admiration of what a brilliant achievement this novel is. It is really quite remarkable.

 
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