"We are together like in a fabric"

Jonah Hassen Khemiri's fifth novel is written on straight, fluid prose and speaks of an adult son who is doing his best to raise a tired, self-lazy dad, nowadays his grandfather. But also that we have the family we have.

"I am very curious about how families work, as we, in families, are together with each other, as in a frame, through love, guilt and our stories.

When Dagens Nyheter sent him to Gothenburg to write about Way Out West, it became a text about his insane grandmother, which ends up figuring in the anthology "What am I thinking when I think about the life". Anyway, all his novels deal with family and more about the relationship between father and son.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri describes the love of his own father as "founded" even though, during the rise of the Khemiris, they periodically had no contact. The young Jonah experienced the physical absence as a black hole, he sought explanations in society, in economic structures but also in himself. And if it was due to him?

"I did not understand why a parent did not need the presence of a child.It became a mystery.

"Many friends had similar experiences with cardboard stalls, and I remember that we could feel such contempt for parents who did not take care of their children.

When he himself, decades later, his personal record became more complicated.

"I feel a great love for my children, but I also had moments when I felt that I had to fly, I can not get here." The contempt I felt for the generations Previously continued to understand each other.What did they face? There was somewhere the starting point of this novel.

His own father was born badly, his Tunisian grandmother is illiterate. In the life of Jonah Hassen Khemiri, there was talk about the fact that, despite the economic uncertainty, he dared to venture into a professional life that he thought was his only writing. After graduation, he studied economics and literature in parallel.

– I come from a house where money was not obvious. There was almost a debt that I had to pay. Leaving the university to start writing was not easy.

Previously, he had expressed the desire to try to portray the normal, as easy "as to take a holey gas". In order to dispel the feeling that the real writer 's life was unfolding elsewhere, Khemiri' s mocked to write his own daily life with a child of one and four years old.

"For many years, I thought I was composed of words, I sit, read and write, and becoming a dad is a great reminder of the physical, because the big stories take place in the little newspaper.

This summer he was fifteen years after his debut for the first time, something so free. Jonah Hassen Khemiri, winner of the August prize and published in The New Yorker, has returned to his "literary zeros": classic hopes such as Crenshaw Boulevard and Rosecrans Avenue in Los Angeles. He never became a rapper, but a linguistic acrobat and revolted with "One Eye Red".

Linguistic experiences are cleaned up, but its readers recognize it. Even in the "dad clause", the truth is complicated by the fact that the different members of the family of the novel, and especially the mothers, are able to represent the same scenes from their respective points of view. The hopeless grandfather grows up and suddenly awakens sympathy, his neurotic son, on the other hand, becomes pathetic.

But the fundamental question of the novel remains unanswered: how can a parent abandon his child?

– I still do not know. But there is an idea that whoever leaves his family goes out at liberty. I think that is not the case. I think you are going into isolation and darkness.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri