The Sisters K
by Maureen Sun
Unnamed Press, 2024
Review by Jessica Poon
Three sisters and an egomaniac dad are foundational to both Shakespeare’s King Lear and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The Sisters K, by Maureen Sun, shares tasting notes with both, but is ultimately a distinct creature of its own. Contemporary literature arguably fetishizes strong images as classy stand-ins for messy feelings that could otherwise be straightforwardly told. Refreshingly, The Sisters K feels like clean water unspoiled by pollution, modernity, and excess allegory.
Sun balances multiple narrators, employing five third-person points of view that sometimes blurs with third-person omniscient. Minah, Sarah, and Esther are sisters who “shared the same father but were not full-blooded siblings. And though they each considered the same woman their mother, they were not raised by the same women.” Their father, Eugene Kim, is dying and wants to turn inheritance into a demented competition of demonstrative servility. When the Kim sisters learn about Edwin, a medical doctor who just so happens to be their half-brother, the speculation over an inheritance becomes rife with anxiety, tension, and Eugene’s emotional sadism. All three sisters and Edwin speak eloquently about their emotions. Although they are often hypnotically candid with one another, Sarah withholds the most.
Minah, a lawyer and the eldest daughter, is pragmatic about her romantic prospects and projected children. Her speech about what attracts a man—happiness, as it turns out—feels simultaneously antiquated and contemporary, but always compelling. Minah notes that happiness is much easier to achieve if a person is “living in a beautiful place [that] makes you feel like you’ve stepped out of a painting. … The flowers and the view that make you feel you’re human and not a caged animal.” Minah’s explanations of her desired life remind me of the comedian Ali Wong saying, “That $10-a-box Whole Foods mango that was sliced by white people. That’s the kind of income bracket I’m striving for. That’s when you know you’ve made it.”
Sarah, a former gifted pianist, a professor without tenure, and her father’s favourite—he chose her name—could certainly use the money, but doesn’t want it. Ironically, she is the one who is most likely to receive the biggest share. Her demeanor often comes across as cold, in contrast to her intellectual vibrancy and passion for books.
Sarah includes Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, on her syllabus, which proves contentious with the chair of the English department, who Sarah believes “valued niceness over truth.” This conflict demonstrates Sarah’s resistance to authority and conformity, as well as Sarah’s tendency to position herself as intellectually superior to others. When Sarah marks papers, she notes that one student “was proving to be the kind of small-minded moralist who was also a bad reader, though she thought of herself as a left-leaning intellectual activist.” Sarah’s contempt for simplistic, unnuanced analysis is pleasingly reminiscent of the protagonist in Julia May Jonas’s novel, Vladimir. More sympathetically, Sarah does wonder if she would, at her students’ age, produce an analysis just like them. Sarah believes, “Hell was as factitious as the novel she’d just defended, which said that criminals suffered the self-inflicted dehumanization of violating another’s humanity. How many rapists suffered not at all for their crimes? She hated the idea of poetic justice.”
Later, Sarah says to Esther: “Poetry is wrong because it thinks something can be other than what it is. … Poetry isn’t real. I’m not like you, and I’ll never be like you, even though we’re sisters. Even though I do love you. But I still read poetry.” Here, Sarah resists being likened to her younger sister. She would rather have “her patheticness be known” than be compared to her sister. Sarah’s need to be an individual, in the most self-aggrandizing way possible, is paramount. Of course, the desire to be seen as an individual—even if that means being uniquely, terribly flawed—is the most ordinary thing in the world. In this sense, Sarah’s fear mirrors Angela’s from Sam Mendes’s film, American Beauty. Angela says, “I don’t think there’s anything worse than being ordinary.” Sarah vilifies what she perceives to be inherent fallacy in the metaphors and similes prevalent in poetry. At the same time, as an educator and reader, Sarah admits—and it does feel confessional—to reading poetry, which suggests Sarah finds rich aesthetic value—even compulsion—beyond truth and categorization.
At one point, Sarah reflects that she “normally experienced happy occasions and infelicities alike as the outcome of fortune to be endured. Her life felt personal today, continuous with the person she was, and not something to which she must submit.” Sun’s flair for highly specific yet aphoristic-sounding sentences is continuous and frequent. Later, a simple misunderstanding of a tense, becomes crucial to an unexpected dénouement.
Regarding Sarah’s views on Minah’s conventional desires for a marriage and family, Sarah thinks, “Minah might talk about men as if they were dogs, but she was, after all, planning to breed with one of them.” The novel invokes dogs as metaphors and images throughout the book. From Edwin’s perspective, Esther reminds him “of a beaten-down dog, meek and incurably distressed.” A priest is described as having a “noble mien that reminded her of a greyhound.” This frequent invocation of dogs seems to signify that while blind obeisance and gratitude are—at least from Eugene’s patriarchal point of view—desirable, that there is something grotesquely weak about such devotion. After all, Eugene’s favourite daughter is not Esther—the closest to a meek dog—but Sarah, an iconoclastic, intellectual loner who rebukes Eugene. Edwin’s mother, who Eugene fantasizes about raping, does not defer to Eugene. Tellingly, Edwin’s mother’s lack of deference causes Eugene to respect her more.
Esther, the youngest and the least decipherable, has a sweetness reminiscent of Alyosha, the youngest brother in The Brothers Karamazov, and the moral rectitude of King Lear’s Cordelia. She’s soft-spoken, seemingly the kindest, and also a college drop-out with no distinct profession. Minah observes that “Consciously or not, Esther was always seeking eye contact.”
Of her father, Esther says, “Whether we love him or hate him, however I feel about him, he’s shaped my life. I want to help him. Why is it wrong to help someone, even someone so hateful? How can that be wrong?” Given that Eugene, more than once, baselessly calls Esther a whore, Esther’s emotional generosity is commendable. Esther has the most time and empathy between the sisters. Nevertheless, Esther has always been treated by her family, at best, as an afterthought. Esther sounds most like Alyosha when she says to Minah: “You can make a living. Why do you need so much? What do you want to teach your children—generosity, or miserliness and greed?”
Edwin’s ascendancy as a doctor is rooted in superiority—“He could ignore everything a patient said and still know more than them about what was inside them. When this happened, he felt powerful and proud.” Edwin’s childhood longing for a stable father figure resists the convenience of a specific catalyst. Money inspires Edwin to oversee caretaking duties that otherwise could be delegated to professionals of no familial relation. Love is treated transactionally, or with suspicion. So are family members. There is a wonderful bit of dialogue when Edwin says to Minah, “I find myself talking about octopuses with you, but I don’t know whether to trust you. Why is that?” For one, octopuses don’t compete with humans for inheritances. But, they, too, contain multitudes.
In one of many profound conversations between Sarah and Esther, Sarah expresses the feeling that “I can’t be the good character who learns and changes for the better. I’m the one you want to forget.” Yet, in choosing to be uncharacteristically vulnerable with her younger sister, rather than her typical reticence, Sarah ironically undermines her own unflattering self-mythology. It’s worth noting that Sarah does not characterize herself as forgettable; rather, she believes herself to be indelible in the worst way possible. It may be said that change is often minute, imperceptible, and frequently for the worse. Even so, in Sarah’s case, there are faint, sporadic glimmerings of a slightly different self—one who can tell her sister how she really feels. Sarah’s subtle communicative change epitomizes E.M. Forster’s epigraph from his novel, Howards End: “Only connect.”
Sun’s contemporary retelling of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is, in faithful concordance with its progenitor, not a cheerful novel. It is a psychologically precise portrait of a family full of bittersweet anguish and reciprocated animosities, but importantly, it’s also studded with hope. Nobody will be able to forget this family.
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Jessica Poon is a Vancouver-based writer, picture taker, and former line cook. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming, in the British Columbia Review, Joyland, The Offing, Rat’s Ass Review, Ricepaper, subTerrain, Tahoma Literary Review, and the Toronto Star. She is currently revising her first novel.