The Kafka-esque struggle of an Afghan German girl is all too timely

As soon as in a blue moon a debut novel comes alongside, saying a voice fairly not like every other, with a layered story and sentences that crackle and pop, begging to be learn aloud. Aria Aber’s splendid “Good Woman” introduces simply such a voice, chronicling a younger Afghan German girl’s misadventures amongst Berlin’s evening golf equipment and drug dens as she plunges right into a risky romance with an expatriate American author. The ebook’s not with out wobbles, however Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold right here, very similar to Kaveh Akbar did in final yr’s acclaimed “Martyr!”

Aber’s narrator, Nila, now on the cusp of 30, seems again a decade at her 19-year-old self, when she drifted into the orbit of Marlowe, a 36-year-old Californian who’d revealed a celebrated novel in his youth however hadn’t adopted up, wallowing as an alternative in liquor and ecstasy, hopping from mattress to mattress. Nila’s mother and father had been medical doctors in Kabul, however after immigrating to Berlin had been pressured to take menial jobs. They’re embedded inside her father’s household and the blue-collar Afghan group, which the creator evokes brilliantly: “My grandmother had the face of a fox, or that of a Soviet actress: skinny, tattooed eyebrows over gray-green eyes, hair at all times bleached blond. She cherished complaining and gave beginning to seven kids, together with my father. She was the one one who wore chador, and God was a tenet greater than a regulation.”

Nila feels the conflict between a strict Shia upbringing and her lusty impulses. She’d earned a scholarship to an unique ladies’ faculty, the place she’d snuck out to social gathering, and had suffered consecutive tragedies when her mom all of the sudden died and a girlfriend dropped her. Nila’s concern of abandonment drives “Good Woman”; her feelings pinwheel throughout the pages. Again within the metropolis, she maintains a détente together with her widower father and waitresses at a jazz membership whereas making use of to artwork colleges in London; she yearns to be a photographer within the mode of Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus. However she will be able to’t escape the temptations round her.

If Nila is the occasional good lady, then Marlowe’s a foul boy, a Dionysus of Berlin’s demimonde, dishing out ecstasy and intercourse, gathering outsiders and anti-capitalists into his sphere. The hookups are fluid, and the ruminations on politics are plentiful. (There’s even a cat named Leon Trotsky.) Nila falls underneath the spell of this quick crowd “who took David Foster Wallace too critically and deodorant not critically sufficient.” Squeezed amid “bacterial” lavatory stalls, she immerses herself in a tide of pace and acid, later mendacity to her father when she stumbles residence, her hair reeking of cigarettes. Marlowe, whereas in an open relationship with one other girl, is drawn to Nila’s adventurous spirit and caustic intelligence. He provides her a Nikkormat digicam and encourages her to pursue her ardour. Their intimacy shades purple amid blasts of obsession and tenderness, but Aber nimbly pulls off the Rimbaud act.

“Good Woman,” then, is a bildungsroman, gorgeously full of Nila’s epiphanies on literature and philosophy, a story of seductive dangers and the burdens of diaspora. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” hovers over “Good Woman” as its heroine undergoes a radical transformation. Marlowe considers himself greater than only a lover; he’s additionally a mentor, gently steering her towards her personal wishes and the way to specific them via the artwork she makes (and indulging in a little bit of mansplaining). She embraces and resents him, a twenty first century repackaging of “Romeo and Juliet,” and like Shakespeare’s characters, the duo proceed to their doom. Their connection unravels.

Nila’s plan is to exit west; certainly, Aber’s prose has the lyrical lilt of Mohsin Hamid’s fiction. Her reckless habits, together with a visit to Italy, leads to a form of home arrest, straining her relationship together with her surviving father or mother: “When my father left the condo, he took that dangling chain of keys and locked the door from the skin like a janitor. … My tall, skinny father with silver streaks in his hair, the eyebrows that I brushed and trimmed for him.”

Like Nila, Aber was raised in Berlin, talking Farsi and German. In the end, the divide inside Nila displays the rising chasm between east and west; she rightly perceives a spike in xenophobic nationalism throughout Europe and america. “Good Woman” views our present unrest via an inclusive prism: Because the novel concludes, Nila visits a world cemetery, studded with headstones of Turks and Muslims, Germans and Jews. Literature, Aber suggests, could not solely bridge warring peoples, but in addition bind our private conflicts.

“On a molecular degree, I believed, I comprehended what he wrote, even why he turned Gregor into a large bug,” Nila observes of Kafka’s canonical work. “Who would perceive the perils of a person trapped in his childhood room in unhuman type greater than an Afghan lady making an attempt to dwell?”

Hamilton Cain is a ebook critic in New York and the creator of a memoir, “This Boy’s Religion: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”