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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
All happy families are alike, Leo Tolstoy proclaimed; each unhappy family is a gift to novelists and readers. If fiction writers pounce upon blazing feuds, lovingly nurtured grievances and icy estrangements as fodder for deathless prose, family sagas have been catnip for readers since Tolstoy’s time, arguably even before.
I’ve loved a Big Fat Family story ever since my late, classically inclined grandmother explained the Mahabharata — the 3rd- 4th-century Sanskrit epic close to every Indian’s heart — to me as a bitter property dispute between brothers that also embraces gambling skills, philosophy and a war of wars.
Great family sagas, from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, can be timeless portraits of families adapting to change, at home or in exile. We form our deepest selves around clan, kin and the clashes that inevitably arise at such close quarters. And writers today also take a closer look at childhood bonds and fractures, at the shadows behind the group photos.
Jemimah Wei’s debut novel, The Original Daughter, stirs the cauldron in a gripping tale of two sisters — one adopted — long separated by acts of cruelty and the inability to forgive. Set in Singapore and New Zealand, Wei’s story reflects the practice, probably old but discussed with less stigma these days, of going no-contact when close relationships feel too painful, too broken to fix. But the 33-year-old Singapore-born writer illuminates both the need for, and the cost of, estrangement. As a character says after suffering a loss, “How various our excuses, as we flail about in our attempts to avoid facing the shame of wanting love.”
Sometimes the pressures a family faces come from history, though few novels tackle exile as riotously as Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians. Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, it features three generations of Iranian women from the affluent Valiat family, split between Iran and Los Angeles. Mahloudji kicks off with a killer first sentence: “For a week it was a nonstop party of drugs and cartoons until an hour ago when I bailed my Auntie Shirin out of the Aspen jail after her arrest for attempted prostitution.” Her crazy rich Persians saga is thoroughly refreshing, and sandwiches serious reflections on the impact of the choice to leave or stay on successive generations between thick slabs of black humour.
Some of my favourite authors tango with the past; Adam Haslett, the Pulitzer-nominated US novelist, channels Ivan Turgenev’s spirit in Mothers and Sons, also out earlier this year. Peter, an immigration lawyer in his forties, tells his mother Ann, who runs a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont, that her job is “to care more about strangers”. And yet Peter shies from intimacy himself, noting, “How full of shame it is to be lonely.”
Turgenev, whose spirit hovers like a patron saint above this novel, was famously sceptical of the joys of family life, after surviving a turbulent childhood. He cited his “dear, good friends” as “my only family, whom I love above everything in the world”. As for Haslett, he never writes an obvious or heavy-handed ending, but for both mother and son, the journey into understanding is a fragile but beautiful one.
For a life-long reader, it’s a pleasure to discover how different generations take an old form — family sagas — and find a fresh approach.
One of this summer’s most buzzed-about novels, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters, which features three Swedish-Tunisian siblings, Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia Mikkola, and their life-long friend, a writer called Jonas, divides 732 pages into seven progressively shorter chapters. Khemiri told Publishers Weekly that he “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.” The effect is startling; you age along with the Mikkolas, feeling the decades fly by as though it were your own life, your own family memories and experiences going past.
I imagine most writers feel a satisfaction at creating, like Ann Patchett or Abraham Verghese, a fictional family that becomes as vivid as their own, with all their quirks, blessings and annoyances. For readers with less than perfect families, a stirring melodrama can make you feel less alone; for readers with un-Tolstoyan happy families, what a frisson to read about the storms and dramas of strangers. Either way, it’s a win.
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