Aria Aber's debut novel, Good Girl, explores the themes of escape, identity, and the impact of political and familial strife on a young woman's life.
A girl can get in almost anywhere, the protagonist of Aria Aber’s Good Girl tells us, even if she can’t get out. It is a statement that sets the tone for the novel, a striking debut from the Germany-born writer whose poetry collection Hard Damage was published in 2019. The story is told from the perspective of Nila, a young woman whose life has thus far been defined by escape, or rather its impossibility.
Her parents fled Afghanistan in the 1980s and landed in Europe; she was the baby that “was needed as an anchor to postpone deportation”. She is now 19, her life plagued by instability and claustrophobia: whether in the private boarding school she attended on a scholarship or the grim block of flats in Berlin where she was raised, she feels perpetually trapped. It is no exaggeration to say our narrator views her life as the result of an accumulation of political and familial strife. The “long chain of geopolitical events” that led to her birth range from the disastrous US and Russian interventions in Afghanistan to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Her parents, who were doctors and dreamers in their homeland, had their language, identities and medical licences stripped from them when they left. Now Nila lives in their stifling flat in Berlin with her almost-mute, vaguely disapproving father and her dead mother’s absence. She quickly becomes intent on evading her family and her past by sinking herself into the sweaty, strung-out atmosphere of Berlin’s nightclubs. It is here that she meets thirtysomething American writer Marlowe Woods, forming an intense relationship that will lead to much self-discovery and strain. The novel is not driven by a forceful plot. The reader instead follows Nila as she attempts to escape the realities of her existence through art, drugs and lov
LITERATURE DEBUT NOVEL REFUGEE EXPERIENCE IDENTITY CRISIS BERLIN NIGHTLIFE
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