The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

 The Sisters

By Jonas Hassen Khemiri

The Sisters and The Brothers might be more apt, since this saga follows the parallel and periodically intersecting lives of two sets of three siblings born in Sweden of a Tunisian-Swedish union. In both cases, the Tunisian parent is shifty, unreliable, inexplicably absent, withholding. The Swedish parent is solid but colorless. In this autobiographical novel, the narrator, who shares the author’s first and last names, is the oldest of three brothers whose Tunisian father lets them down, repeatedly, while their hardworking Swedish mother keeps them afloat. The three sisters are the daughters of a Swedish father who died early, and an unstable, cold Tunisian mother who repeatedly abandons them, dipping in and out of schizophrenic episodes. Ina, the oldest sister, like Jonas, the oldest brother, is abnormally tall, and carries the weight of responsibility. The middle sister, Evelyn, is the irresponsible charmer, and the youngest, Anastasia, the damaged drug dependent.

This is not Khemiri’s first work of fiction, but it is his first to be written in English. It shares the length and exhaustive detail of many first autobiographical works. It also subscribes the unhurried sense of time of Scandinavian writers. The chapters weave in and out of unconnected anecdotes not entirely justified by the resulting final tapestry. Some one-sentence passages move with almost Joycean propulsive force, but others indulge in play-by-play, pointless accounts of a basketball game, for example. Still, Khemiri’s voice is distinctive and often compelling, if the reader is prepared to go along for a ride where the detours, not the destination, are the purpose.

Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

 Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

The self-styled “champions of Western civilization” who are outraged by Christopher Nolan’s revisionist version of the Odyssey should be defending it instead. Why? The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, who may have lived circa the 8thC BCE, retell Bronze Age myths that preceded their author by some 500 years. So Homer’s retelling of these myths was not only influenced by the mores of his own time and place, but also by what he imagined the lives of Bronze Age Acheans to have been. In a word, or rather three of Hobbes’s: nasty, brutish, and short. Men were violent, cruel, greedy, deeply ignorant and superstitious. They were also misogynist. In Homer’s retelling, women and demi-goddesses seduced men to betray and enthrall them. The infidelity of Sparta’s queen Helen is the justification for launching “a thousand ships” of war against Troy. Calypso and Circe lure, deceive, blackmail, and enslave Odysseus and his men. Only patient Penelope falls on the right side of the “Madonna or whore” divide.

Is this the edifying image of Western Civilization that we wish to present? Critics of Nolan’s film who accuse him of whitewashing Homer’s stories are quite right, he does so. He presents his protagonists as men of conscience and honor, and attributes to them the moral and intellectual virtues developed over the intervening 32 centuries of progress in history, religion and philosophy. The civilizing centuries that brought us Aristotle and the Abrahamic religions, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, Newton and space exploration. The centuries that separate us, we hope, from the mindless, guzzling man-pigs of Circe’s Bronze Age.