The Sisters is Swedish novelist and playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s first book drafted initially through English. A seemingly superfluous detail if his process wasn’t vital to the central themes of this immersive epic saga.
Structured to capture the experience of time speeding up as we age, the book’s sections count down from one year, six months, one month, one day to one minute. Within this framework, the narrative covers three decades in the chaotic lives of the Mikkola sisters and their childhood friend Jonas – a character sharing the name and life trajectory of the author.
In this work of autofiction, Khemiri blends truth, fiction, superstition and myth in a sprawling narrative. In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux used third-person point of view to lengthen the distance between herself and the raw personal experiences she rendered on to the page. This distance in The Sisters, the author admits through his character Jonas, was created by writing initially through English, a language of which his command was “imperfect”.
Like Khemiri, Jonas and the Mikkola sisters are of Swedish Tunisian heritage. To live life in a homogenous society such as Sweden, as middle sister Evelyn notes, is to “explain herself, in every room she entered”. An experience relatable to many of mixed heritage in modern Ireland.
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The fictionalised sisters are convinced a strong curse hangs over their family: everything they love they will lose. This curse is a tangible imprint of trauma, an example of how we build meaning and myth to make sense of our experience. For Jonas and the sisters, it is the micro and the macro: remnants left by a broken family – and also the scars of migration, of empire. While Jonas is merely a blip on their memory, the sisters are a defining force in understanding his own identity. Ultimately, however, his very existence challenges the truth of a narrative the Mikkola’s have understood and lived by all their lives.
At more than 600 pages, this novel is a challenge to the modern attention span. However, the multidimensional layers, its honesty and rawness, make it a triumph. The pleasure is in the writing and the fascinating lives Khemiri constructs. Like its structure, time with this novel flies.
