Nell Zink’s Sister Europe is a slim, crackling novel that compresses an astonishing amount of life into just 190 pages. Set over a single, increasingly unhinged night in Berlin, it follows a ragtag constellation of characters: Demian, a jaded art critic; his 15-year-old trans daughter, Nicole; a cynical American expat; a suicidal heiress; a suspicious undercover cop; and a listless Arab prince.
Brought together by a tedious literary gala at the Hotel Intercontinental, the group is propelled into the city’s charismatic nightlife by alcohol and a hunger for connection.
This is a novel driven almost entirely by dialogue; aphoristic, brittle, often dazzling. “Life is all about raising expectations and seeing them crushed,” one character remarks. “Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone.”
The wit is real, but grows wearying. Zink’s characters all speak and think in the same mordant register, which soon begins to feel like ventriloquism. The prose fizzles, but rarely deepens. The emotional pitch remains static, and the narrative draws to an anticlimactic ending: the characters simply drift away, back into their separate lives, largely unchanged.
The experience is familiar to anyone who’s stayed out until dawn in Berlin: a blur of charm and strangeness that, once the sun rises, begins to feel insubstantial, even faintly depressing. Sister Europe succeeds and fails on precisely this point. It captures too well the intoxicated logic of these repeating nights: their momentum, their allure, and their descent into meaninglessness.
At one point, Zink brings her characters to a Burger King, where their enthusiasm wilts under bright lighting. Like most anecdotes of drunken shenanigans, it’s amusing in the moment but ultimately forgettable.
Still, Zink’s writing has an obvious intelligence that makes her flaws appear at least partly intentional. It’s tempting to view the novel as diagnostic. Perhaps she is less interested in telling a story than in mapping a mood, one of stylish drift and emotional inertia. Her characters are fluent in irony and cushioned by privilege. They find themselves spiritually deadened by an excess of false freedoms.
If the novel feels empty at the centre, that may be the point. Sister Europe is a portrait of a world where everything is permitted, so nothing matters.
