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American writer Nell Zink has made his name with a series of shorter and more sparkling novels since his excellent beginnings The wall screen Ten years ago. His books are energetic and populated by characters whose individualism borders on eccentricity: an adopted of flamenco dance hereAn anarchist squatter there.
First of all, Europe sister seems more of the same thing. The setting is the adopted house of Zink de BerlinWhere in February 2023, a heterogeneous group – Infiltrated cop, Trans adolescent, Prince and more – meet in a hotel for a ceremony for a literary awards. The recipient is an Arab writer named Masud, who now lives in Norway, although the story really concerns those around him.
The old friend of Masud, Demian, a art And architecture criticism, and her 15 -year -old daughter, Nicole; A large part of history follows their experiences at night. And everything comes with cynicism – “Life consists in raising expectations and seeing them crushed. Life is an atrocious phase in everyone's life ” – that no character escapes.
Masud obtains cynical treatment-his writing suffers from “an anti-black and persistent racism”-just as a halfan, which “apologized, on the grounds that it would be difficult for an anti-black racist to do a lot of damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a fatal threat”. The teenager Nicole, who is trans, earns a little more generosity of the authors. When we meet her, she is on the street who pretended to be a sex worker, hoping to use the simple appetites of heterosexual men as a guide to know if she is really beautiful – which seems to be less fun to her naivety than to reflect her innocence.
The engine of the plot, as it is, is the award ceremony, where Zink Rolls up his characters and triggers them. But she injured them too closely, and they skitter through the pages in a nervous dialogue fury that rarely settles on a single scenario. Other characters are on board: the Arab Prince Radi (“Do you have a day work, or is it just prince stuff?” Asks him a participant); Klaus, an infiltrated cop who hangs out Nicole because he thinks she is really a sex worker; Friends and hangers like Livia, Avianca and a dog named Fisti.
With a few exceptions, most of the book scenes consist of conversations for several people: people sit or get up and speak and speak, with dark and briefly. (For the variety, at one point, they go on a night hike in Burger King.) These prolonged scenes lack focus, which leads to whole sections that feel anti-animal and static.
There are moments of relief, generally where one or two characters are at the forefront, like a hairstyle seduction scene of the toes with Radi and Nicole (“I heard that there are people who call me” Radi the Impaler “). And the Masud prices scene is a very comical moment, because the advanced speeches drag beyond their attributed length, then, in a disturbing way, dressed in its “turtleneck to the brand with chocolate loop caps”, masud “market with podium, holding a novel of six hundred pages”.
In fact, in its VIM and its vigor, Europe sister Has the characteristics of a large idiosyncratic novel of 600 pages, with the exception of the length, and this is where its problem lies. The book is so compressed that there is no respiratory space, none of the connective fabrics of the plot and the background that we need to know the characters better. He jumps on the surface of things beautifully; But adding more surface, then more, then more, does not replace the stop and thought.
Europe sister by Nell Zink Viking 14.99 £ / KNOPF $ 28 208 pages
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