The Sisters finds three Swedish Tunisian siblings grappling with their sense of home in a sprawling narrative that spans 35 years.
You originally wrote The Sisters in English, then in Swedish and again in English. How did all this come about?
The strange thing was that the characters kept speaking to me in English. I’ve been a writer long enough to know that when a character wants something, it’s a bad idea to fight it. So I decided to write a couple of chapters in English to see what would happen; they kept talking, and soon I had a 600-page novel. When I finished, I didn’t know if I would translate it myself or get a translator and I thought, this was the time to ask the sensei.
The sensei?
If my life were a kung fu movie, this would be the scene where the hero meets his sensei for an answer. Changing languages can be a source of freedom, and this book was so much about finding freedom. I needed to write it in English because of some of the more personal memories. Writing the memories in English was an act of liberation, and writing it again in Swedish was an act of liberation. Certain languages bring out different sides of a person. Nabokov went back and forth in English and Russian, which made
me think: I can do this, and I can change as much as I want. So I rewrote it in Swedish, which was fun because I had no obligation
to the writer—me—the way a translator does. I’d never written a novel in this way before.
One of the main characters is Jonas, a writer who grew up with the sisters. This name also appears in your other books. What’s going on there?
I’ve always been curious as to how many meanings one name can contain. The character Jonas is very different in each of my books, which reminds the reader and myself that a name is not static. It’s dynamic and always changing. In Montecore, for example, Jonas is an angry young man. Part of my journey as a writer and a person
is that with age, it’s harder to cling to anger.
The Sisters has an unusual timeline, beginning with a full year in 2000 and ending with one minute in 2035. What made you structure the novel this way?
I wanted to capture how time feels. It’s always speeding up as you age. The first part takes place over a year, then six months, one month, one day, and finally, one minute. One of the reasons that you can read it so quickly despite the number of pages is we feel with the characters that time is speeding up.
Did you set out to write such a long book?
Yes, I knew it would be long. I was curious about what happens to a story once you enlarge the canvas. It’s tricky to mention other writers because it sounds like you are comparing yourself, but I do want to mention War and Peace. One of the things I loved about that novel was that I was fascinated by how readable it was despite its length, and one of the clues I had was that the chapters were short but the canvas was big.
