Fiction

Shida Bazyar Drei Kameradinnen
[Sisters in arms]

Book cover Sisters in arms

Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag
 Cologne 2021
ISBN 978-3-462-05276-3
352 Pages
Publisher’s contact details

Translation Grant Programme
Published in Italian with a grant from Litrix.de.

Sample translations

A broad and multi-layered canvas of German reality

The novel owes its title to Erich Maria Remarque, whose 1936 novel “Three Comrades” depicts an intense friendship between three men at the end of the 20th century. It was this fictionalised fin de siècle friendship that inspired Shida Bazyar to call her novel “Three Female Comrades”. It centres around three female friends, Kasih, Hani and Saya. They - and their parents - come from very different parts of the world. We never discover which ones - because this information would do nothing more than satisfy our own curiosity. More important is that the three friends stick together through thick and thin. They have grown up in the same place, a socially deprived area, and their enduring friendship forms the quintessence of this heated novel. It is not just by chance that the cover features a flickering flame.

The story begins with a newspaper report concerning an arson attack apparently related to Islamism. One of the three friends - Saya M - is suspected of having been involved. Her friend Kashih breezily describes the run-up to the attack, almost as if she had been listening in on it. She repeatedly appeals directly to the reader in intimate terms, more or less accusing them of thinking in a particular way, or harbouring particular prejudices. Sometimes Kashih is, unfortunately, right. The novel also toys with its own fictiveness: the narrator flirts with the idea that she may or may not have invented everything that she has described, and readers have to try to make sense of it all.

The fresh narrative voice alone makes this novel something special. First-person narrator Kasih is a Sociology graduate. However, she can’t find a job - which means that she has time to tell us in great detail about what has happened to her friends and her thus far, and what they are doing now. Kasih is feisty - but she’s also a classic unreliable narrator: she’s so flaky that she disappears at one point to go to buy beer and cigarettes from the corner shop. Readers can only guess at whether Kasih’s story - sometimes funny, sometimes furious - is true or not. Meanwhile, her friend Hani carves out a reluctant living as an office admin assistant, while Saya runs a workshop. The three of them are reunited at a wedding reception. The news is dominated by a trial which resembles the trial of the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation the “National Socialist Underground” (NSU).

The thematic wheels of the novel are greased by racism, sexism and class conflict. The three friends have only ever known discrimination. The author Shida Bazyar understands what she’s describing. She was born in 1988 in Hermeskeil in the Rheinland. Her parents had fled to Germany the previous year from Iran. Shida Bazyar spent many years working in the field of youth education; she studied Creative Writing at Hildesheim and immediately rose to prominence with her first novel, “Nachts ist es leise in Teheran” (“All is Quiet in Tehran at Night”). In this novel, she uses different narrative perspectives to reflect the turmoil of an Iranian-German family; she was duly awarded the Ulla Hahn Author Award and the Uwe Johnson Prize. 

Her second novel uses the women’s very different lifestyles to paint an impressively broad and multi-layered canvas of German reality. The author focuses sharply on the differences in social status, thereby doing exactly what current discourse calls for: she indicates the respective standpoints of the particular characters by leaving us in no doubt as to why they are speaking and acting in a particular way. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interpreted Bazyar’s novel as an “all-encompassing accusation”; in the words of the author Karosh Taha, “Three Female Comrades is a bill of indictment, and we’re all subpoenaed.” In short: this is a fierce, entertaining novel that goes straight to the heart of current debates and reads all of us the Riot Act.
 

Translated by Helena Kirkby

Book cover Sisters in arms

By Shirin Sojitrawalla

Shirin Sojitrawalla is a freelance journalist who writes chiefly on theatre and literature for a variety of outlets including Deutschlandfunk, taz - die tageszeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Theater der Zeit and Nachtkritik.de. She lives and works in Wiesbaden.

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