Sister Europe, Nell Zink
“A pale shadow of her former self – a self that had itself been a shadow, like the ones in Plato’s cave – she was already haunting him.”
Sister Europe is the story of a single night, but it’s also the story of how years can build up as part of individual experience without the need to explicitly outline their influence. This is a novel of false-starts and subverted expectations. Eroticism laces the night like electricity, but Zink refuses to settle for a straightforward climax, instead choosing to jumble up the players in unexpected and exciting ways.
The narrative follows a group of literati gathering for an award ceremony in Berlin – a father and husband desperate to fill seats; his trans daughter, trying her best to prove her womanhood as she reaches her mid-teens; her uncle, a man who is well-loved and unafraid of complicated topics; his date for the night, an elusive socialite; their family friend, an heiress who craves change; an undercover police officer riddled with misunderstandings; and a prince, standing in for his mother to lead the award ceremony and desperately out-of-place. Their idiosyncrasies and situation – trawling through Berlin at night in desperate search of something to do, afraid to end the night early – makes each character feel fully realised and sympathetic, even as they espouse tasteless or downright bigoted opinions. Although her characters are deeply flawed, Zink holds off on judgement, allowing the text to breathe for itself and the reader to cast their own perspective across its events.
Questions of race, gender, sexuality, and class are all woven throughout the novel – indeed, they are the foundations of the narrative, which features a winding plot which goes nowhere and everywhere all at once. Through the streets of Berlin, our characters wonder, having conversations and recalling memories which span a variety of contemporary sociopolitical topics. But, unlike her characters, Zink’s semi-omniscient narrator refuses to make assumptions. While the characters misinterpret each other, the novel slowly reveals that no single figure is in possession of all the facts, and therefore that each of their individual judgements exist in a Schrödinger’s-cat-like state of concurrent truth and untruth.
What Zink makes clear, in other words, is the relativity of truth in the age of social media and identity politics. Between conversations about Nazism and the war in Ukraine, each figure’s identity is professed to them through the opinions – spoken or thought – of the others, leaving behind a sour taste which invites questions about the limitations of intellectualism without empathy, of dissatisfaction in the face of material success.
Expertly crafted, with deep wisdom underlining every line, Sister Europe is a novel for our times, and an absolute must-read in 2025.
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