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The Family Clause
The Family Clause
A Novel
"The son did as he was told. All his bloody life, he has done as he has been told. Time to change that, he thinks, grabbing a pen. He doesn't write that this will be the last time his father stays here. He doesn't write that he wants to break the father clause. Instead, he writes: Welcome, Dad. Hope you had a good flight."
A grandfather who lives abroad returns home to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather is perfect—at least, according to himself.
But over the course of ten intense days, relationships unfold and painful memories resurface. The grandfather is confronted by his past. The daughter is faced with an impossible choice. The son tries to write himself free. Something has to give. Per a longstanding family agreement, the grandfather has maintained his Swedish residency by coming to stay with his son every six months. Can this clause be renegotiated, or will it chain the family to its past forever?
Through a series of quickly changing perspectives, in The Family Clause Jonas Hassen Khemiri evokes an intimate portrait of a chaotic and perfectly normal family, deeply wounded by the death of a child and the disappearance of a father.
"The son did as he was told. All his bloody life, he has done as he has been told. Time to change that, he thinks, grabbing a pen. He doesn't write that this will be the last time his father stays here. He doesn't write that he wants to break the father clause. Instead, he writes: Welcome, Dad. Hope you had a good flight."
A grandfather who lives abroad returns home to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather is perfect—at least, according to himself.
But over the course of ten intense days, relationships unfold and painful memories resurface. The grandfather is confronted by his past. The daughter is faced with an impossible choice. The son tries to write himself free. Something has to give. Per a longstanding family agreement, the grandfather has maintained his Swedish residency by coming to stay with his son every six months. Can this clause be renegotiated, or will it chain the family to its past forever?
Through a series of quickly changing perspectives, in The Family Clause Jonas Hassen Khemiri evokes an intimate portrait of a chaotic and perfectly normal family, deeply wounded by the death of a child and the disappearance of a father.
Reviews-
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April 1, 2020
A patriarch's visit to his adult children triggers some lingering stresses and pushes everyone to a breaking point. Khemiri's fifth novel and third to be translated into English tracks 10 emotionally stressful days in the life of one family in Stockholm. Twice a year the "grandfather" (characters are identified solely by their familial roles) comes to the city to visit his son and daughter, but his arrival is treated like that of a coming storm. He's casually bigoted, critical of nearly everyone he interacts with, and his visits seem less loving than strategic: His son maintains a flat for him to stay in so he can claim Swedish residency and dodge taxes in his (unnamed) home country. The son is thinking of breaking this "father clause," but he's long been timid and indecisive and is now ground down as a stay-at-home dad to a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old. (There are multiple attenuated scenes of him stressfully prepping the tots for the day; true to Scandinavian literary fiction standards, bowel movements are prominent.) Nearby, the daughter, who's pregnant, is having second thoughts about her boyfriend, a know-it-all film buff stuck in a job as a PE teacher. The son has spent years uncertain about his career direction (on this tumultuous week he's giving stand-up comedy a try), and a prominent theme in the novel is men's need for approval from their fathers and the various ways they suffer from that need. Khemiri's shifting perspectives across characters (including, at one point, that of a ghost) effectively conjure up a mood of dread, which intensifies as we learn more about the grandfather's third child and the circumstances of her death. But the novel's climactic plot turns are mild in comparison to the foreboding tone that precedes them; the concluding feeling is less of things coming to a head than a general muddling through. An original and psychologically rich tale in need of a bit of some drama to match.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 13, 2020
Khemiri (Everything I Don’t Remember) repeats phrases, assembles lists, and stacks up a family’s disappointments in this surprisingly satisfying novel set over the course of a single week. A man, referred to as “a son who is a father,” threatens to revoke the Father Clause, a family agreement allowing his “father who is a grandfather” to stay in the small family-owned apartment in Stockholm whenever he is in town. The father is too critical of his son, too stingy, and too messy, and his overburdened son doesn’t want him there—he has bigger problems. His girlfriend, the mother of their children, has gone back to work as a lawyer, leaving him to care for their two needy children as his self-esteem dips into the red. The father is less demanding of his daughter, the man’s sister, but he doesn’t know about her personal struggles, such as the fact that she’s pregnant and her boyfriend disagrees with her decision to have an abortion. The novel’s wordiness and gymnastically vague details will likely wear on readers, but Khemiri succeeds at creating an infectious sense of melancholia as the poisonous patriarch is forced to reckon with the truth. In a slow build of quotidian moments, Khemiri constructs a familiarly flawed universe that lays bare what it means to be human. -
August 1, 2020
For visa reasons, a "grandfather who is a father" returns to Sweden from the country where he lives for a week or so every six months, staying in the office-turned-guest-apartment of his "son who is a father." Otherwise unnamed, characters are all described this way throughout this multiperspective novel, which draws in the son's sister, girlfriend, and young children over the course of the grandfather's visit. Strung together, engrossing, minute-by-minute passages become layered, and character arcs grows steeper by degrees. Raising two small children, the son and his girlfriend need more generosity from each other than either is getting. His sister, meanwhile, is not sure she can be a mom again. Their father reveals his complicated nature early, which paves the way to understanding his children and the turns their lives have taken as parents and otherwise. Depicting his characters' perceptions of one another, and themselves, Khemiri (Everything I Don't Remember, 2016) points to universal truths: in this and any family, roles change over time, and, with any luck, so do the people in them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.) -
Annie Bostrom, Booklist
"Strung together, engrossing, minute-by-minute passages become layered, and character arcs grows steeper by degrees . . . Depicting his characters' perceptions of one another, and themselves, Khemiri (Everything I Don't Remember, 2016) points to universal truths: in this and any family, roles change over time, and, with any luck, so do the people in them."
- Publishers Weekly "Satisfying . . . Khemiri succeeds at creating an infectious sense of melancholia as the poisonous patriarch is forced to reckon with the truth. In a slow build of quotidian moments, Khemiri constructs a familiarly flawed universe that lays bare what it means to be human."
- Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names "Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Family Clause is a bold and remarkable novel--a marvel of form and imagination that is also miraculously full of heart and compassion."
- Herman Koch, author of The Dinner "I was drawn into this fascinating story right from the beginning and couldn't let loose for days after I had put down The Family Clause. And now, some weeks later, I know I will never forget the grandfather, the son who is a father, the sister, or the girlfriend. They are here to stay in my mind, like those other fictional characters you never meet in real life, but who you would recognize on the street the minute you saw them. Their personalities are far from perfect, but because of that, you love them all the more for who they are."
