After living for years with the feeling he’d been “kidnapped by a curse,” the Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri began writing a novel to save his own life.
On the surface, he was thriving. He was one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers and playwrights. His last book had been a finalist for a National Book Award. He’d begun a family of his own. And yet he still felt a pall cast by his father, whose long absences during his childhood amounted to a profound, existential taunt.
His father’s shadow strangled Khemiri’s sense of possibility, and he was desperate to get out from under it. It trailed him as he crisscrossed the world, met his heroes, practiced shaping language into something that resembled his reality. It’s not a stretch to say that Khemiri has spent a lifetime thinking about curses — a curse being just “a story that tries to predict our future,” as he said in an interview.
“The Sisters,” his new novel, out on June 17 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is his attempt to free himself at last. The book follows Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia Mikkola, who grow up around Stockholm in the orbit of an autofictional narrator named Jonas.
Like Jonas (and like Khemiri), the Mikkolas are Swedish Tunisian and grappling with an unwieldy family inheritance of their own: Their mother, a carpet seller, is convinced the family has been cursed, and each sister chooses a vastly different path in the wake of their dysfunctional childhoods.
Anxious and rigid, Ina exhibits classic symptoms of Eldest Daughter Syndrome — and yet she is eminently sympathetic. The beautiful middle sister, Evelyn, mostly drifts until discovering a late-in-life hunger for acting. Anastasia wrestles with deep-seated anger but is changed by a stint studying Arabic in Tunisia, and by a woman she meets there. The Jonas figure of the book first encounters them in adolescence, and nurtures a long fascination with the trio that ends up revealing a connection deeper than he could have imagined.
Along with its rather imposing size — the novel is over 600 pages — Khemiri created an intricate structure for the book. Each section depicts a smaller and smaller increment of time as the story progresses: a year, six months, one minute. He also braided in memoiristic episodes from his own life, including his years as a misfit adolescent in Stockholm, experience seeking treatment for depression and exuberant months living in New York City.
Khemiri first visited New York at age 18, sharing quarters with a “stripper and two drunk Australians,” and he’d never been happier.
“Do you remember that Naguib Mahfouz quote, ‘Home is not where you are born, it’s where your attempts to escape cease’?” he asked, invoking the Egyptian Nobel laureate. “That is what I felt the first time I came here.”
Having lunch at a rinkside restaurant in Rockefeller Center, the site of some dubious Mikkola family lore that nonetheless draws the sisters to the city, it was easy to imagine Khemiri, now 46, here as a teenager: a young, wiry 6-foot 6-inch man rapt at a Paul Auster reading, fresh off finishing his New York Trilogy or wandering for hours and wondering what about the city gave him such bliss.
The writer Darin Strauss teaches alongside Khemiri at N.Y.U.’s creative writing program both in New York and in Paris. “He’s 90 and he’s 12,” Strauss said. “He’s the most mature person you know, and the most innocent.”
Khemiri’s first book, “One Eye Red” (2003), follows a Swedish teenager of North African descent who vows to become a “thought sultan” — someone impervious to the whims of the mainstream. It sold more than 200,000 copies in Sweden, but even many enthusiastic critics didn’t quite know what to make of its young, seemingly uncategorizable writer.
In an interview with an American publication aimed at Swedish readers, Khemiri described how even positive reviews could express intolerance, citing one that said his book was as if “somebody had lowered a microphone into an immigrant family.”
“Lowered?” he said. “Are we Swedes up here, and the immigrant down there?”
Three years later came the novel “Montecore” and the highly acclaimed play “Invasion!,” a searingly funny black comedy about the politics of living as a Middle Eastern man in a post-9/11 world. It earned Khemiri an Obie Award for playwriting.
Growing up, Khemiri often felt an intense pressure to “prove” his Swedishness despite having been born there (and to a Swedish mother). His family background and physical appearance — he once described himself as a “non-looking Swedish guy with girly hair” — occasionally led others to cast doubt on his identity.
Khemiri’s Tunisian father taught high school French and Arabic for a time, and that multilingual upbringing ensured that Khemiri has always been attuned to the power that language confers. All this was grist for a prodigious writing career: Over the past 20 years, he’s produced six novels and seven plays.
Characters that resemble him, including some named Jonas, often appear in the novels. “Jonas is always shifting,” Khemiri explained in an email. “The recurring name is a reminder that identity is fluid and all labels are invented. Even our names.”
But by Khemiri’s own admission, “The Sisters” is his most personal novel. His increasing obsession with the passage of time, and the feeling that time accelerates the older one gets, helped guide the story. The Mikkola sisters coached Khemiri from the sidelines of his own mind, he said, encouraging him to abandon his preexisting beliefs about his doomed fate.
When the Mikkolas appeared in his head, they were speaking to him in English — and so he wrote the book in that language, the first time he’d ever done so. It allowed him to capture episodes from his life that he said might have been too painful to depict otherwise.
Unlike Swedish, French or Arabic, English — the language of the rapper Nas and the American basketball stars he adored, and a currency among Swedish teenagers seeking cultural clout — was a more neutral linguistic territory for him to explore touchy experiences.
Given New York’s central role in “The Sisters,” it was natural that Khemiri would return to write the novel. In 2021 he moved to Brooklyn from Stockholm with his family, including two young sons who knew no English, after receiving a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library.
After writing a first draft in English and presenting it to his Swedish editor, Khemiri recalled a slightly awkward moment: It’s wonderful you have a new book, his editor said, but why isn’t it in Swedish?
Khemiri translated that initial draft into Swedish, which was published in 2023 as “Systrarna,” and then retranslated it into English.
When he was younger, “I was really fascinated with literary pyrotechnics, pushing the boundary of language,” he said, citing authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Marguerite Duras as his inspiration then. “As an older writer I realized that the possibilities are actually infinite if I pull out my compass and go toward truth.”
It has been worthwhile, even freeing, he added, “to write invented stories that feel more honest than my actual life.”
The novelist Madeleine Thien became close to Khemiri during the Public Library fellowship, when she was working on a book of her own, and recalled him as a perceptive and mischievous comrade in arms.
“He always retained that sense of wonder at the library, the city, while refusing to do what one might expect of a scholar”: screening films and doing yoga in the offices, for example, and generally promoting an impish outlook among the fellows.
The Mikkola sisters, she added, were “so real to him that I felt they were around.”
Strauss, Khemiri’s N.Y.U. colleague, has gotten to know another important figure — albeit a real, flesh and blood one — through Khemiri’s vivid descriptions.
Discussing their parents over a meal early in their friendship, Khemiri told Strauss that when looking for “permission to be more wild than he is, he draws on ‘Hassen’” — Hassen being his middle name, but also the given name of his father, whom Strauss understood to be an unpredictable man.
Khemiri told Strauss he “can’t be that person all the time.” There’s too much innate to him that’s consistent or reliable to be a true renegade. But knowing he could lean on “Hassen” allowed him to be freer in his work.
Still, “Hassen” is a complicated inheritance. That wildness was just one aspect of a man who also made grim and punitive prognoses about Khemiri’s fate. (Khemiri’s father died in January.)
“As anyone who’s ever had a curse put on them knows, even when you try to do the opposite of what it threatens, you’re still living in its shadow,” Khemiri said. “You’re still not free.”
A curse, though, is just a story. No matter how long you believe in one, even one about your own life, it doesn’t mean it’s true.
Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.
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