Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she's unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she's reduced to begging the ancient award-winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend and native-Berliner, Demian, who in turn, invites his two best friends: the troubled innocent Livia, and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal. But Toto doesn't come alone. In tow are his much younger internet date-she's stood him up often enough to be nicknamed "the Flake"-and Demian's 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who's been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema's infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose catastrophic pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.
Compact and spiky ... That Zink has now written a novel long on discourse and short on incident should not be viewed as a capitulation but as its opposite: a defiant gesture delivered with a punk-rock sneer ... Skillful ... May turn off readers allergic to disagreeable characters. Certainly, the real world is shoveling enough of those at us. Yet for all the novel’s outrageous dialogue and tense interactions, it’s the work of an author with a fiercely original and empathetic voice. One leaves the book wanting more of it.
To stay out late in Zink’s world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don’t know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality — a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn’t happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations ... A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. Sister Europe lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some ... Bring your black turtleneck; you may briefly feel you are in an absurdist Wallace Shawn play.
An extraordinary encapsulation of the empty, performative morality that pervades our current era and an exasperating and frequently confounding story that has little to say about that world. Whether or not its contemporary relevance will keep you reading is likely to hinge on your tolerance for the kind of contemptuous men whom Zink portrays with an impressive authenticity. These characters are repeatedly so blithely stupid or offensive that I wanted to scream, not because I was scandalized by their statements or actions, but because I was bored by their tiresome, hackneyed, entitled ignorance ... While fiction does not need to teach a lesson or even make a point, satire — which presumably this novel is aiming for — is more effective leavened with humor or drama, both of which are in short supply here.
