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, asserting a voice fairly not like another, 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 lady’s misadventures amongst Berlin’s night time golf equipment and drug dens as she plunges right into a risky romance with an expatriate American author. The e-book’s not with out wobbles, however Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold right here, very like Kaveh Akbar did in final 12 months’s acclaimed “Martyr!”

Aber’s narrator, Nila, now on the cusp of 30, appears to be like 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 dad and mom 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 neighborhood, 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 youngsters, together with my father. She was the one one who wore chador, and God was a suggestion greater than a legislation.”

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 instantly 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’t escape the temptations round her.

If Nila is the occasional good lady, then Marlowe’s a nasty boy, a Dionysus of Berlin’s demimonde, allotting 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 beneath 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 velocity and acid, later mendacity to her father when she stumbles house, her hair reeking of cigarettes. Marlowe, whereas in an open relationship with one other lady, is drawn to Nila’s adventurous spirit and caustic intelligence. He offers her a Nikkormat digital camera 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 conduct, together with a visit to Italy, ends in a sort of home arrest, straining her relationship together with her surviving mum or dad: “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 global cemetery, studded with headstones of Turks and Muslims, Germans and Jews. Literature, Aber suggests, might not solely bridge warring peoples, but additionally bind our private conflicts.

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

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