HYPER: A Novel, the personal cost of being made stateless in a capitalist world

HYPER: A Novel
AGRI ISMAÏL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A cutting, hypermodern saga of money, family, and survival for fans of Zadie Smith, Patricia Lockwood, and Mohsin Hamid.

When Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness.

Agri Ismaïl's unforgettable debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq's children and their increasingly desperate relationship to money. Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai. Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector. Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.

Siver's world is presented in sparse fragments of contemporary auto-fiction, freely jumping from past to present; Mohammed's in a hysterical realism reflecting London after the stock market crash; and Laika's in a kinetic prose that emulates the speed and rhythms of the internet, a new topic always a click away.At once a love letter to the systems novel and a subversion of the family saga, Hyper uses the unsettled nature of the Kurdish diaspora to capture the dislocations of life under capitalism. Equal parts heartfelt family story and razor-sharp satire, Hyper is an ambitious, thrilling articulation of life in the twenty-first century, marking debut author Agri Ismaïl as one of the most perceptive and exciting new voices in contemporary literature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: An intense read, one that demands you consider the setting, the actors, and the milieu of each section before the read can fully settle in; the rhythm is there but you'll stumble a bit until you find it. It's surreal, it's non-linear, it's got the modernist quality of meeting its characters in their own emotional reality. It asks a lot of the reader in its three hundred fifty-ish pages.

The aftermath of the 2008 crisis was brutal. The richest got hugely richer. It's clear to the reader that the eldest Hardi son, Mohammed, is fully on board with this. He's in a trading firm that makes (until now) the richest richer. His PoV is a funny parodic echo of how those rich Brits speak; you know they would look down on him for his antecedents (an impoverished former Communist Party founder father? my dear...), for his non-U vocabulary and choices of subject. It's fitting that we meet him in David-Lodge-ian prose.

Sive, the only Hardi daughter, isn't thriving. Her convenient marriage to a wealthy Iraqi man collapsed when he decided to take a second wife. She left, she took her child and went to Dubai where she's resentfully eking out a living selling luxury goods to the massive winners of the 2008 collapse. She never really reflects on how her upbringing as the stateless child of social-change losers is being repeated in her own life. Siver reflects, in very spare almost elegiac prose on how women do not control their fates, how men are selfish, hoe children need need need but offer little, and so on and so forth. "You didn't love the man you left so where's the problem?" is my question for her. Not addressed, not in her awareness, only the sense (inherited from her genuinely aggrieved mother) that living her life cut into bits that suit a man not herself is unfair. It certainly is, Siver, and worth fighting not running from into a grey, cold fog of victimhood.

Laika, named for Laika, is probably closest to his bitter, defeated father in outlook. His world is as close to completely contactless as he can make it, like his economically and spiritually impoverished father who barely scrapes by as another stateless immigrant to the land whose brutal, ugly imperialism sowed the seeds of his bitter harvest. It's a tiny, tightly bounded world he's set up in New York City, only opening into the whole of the internet when he's online living a life that suits him. It's all funded by, well, hacking; using the system that's held so many in thrall, under misused power, for generations: he's used a shadow algorithm to trade in tandem with Goldman Sachs. Don't laugh...it's a personal debacle of biblical proportions. It's all told in the most difficult-to-read (for me anyway) prose that tightly focuses on Laika's narrowness and stuckness.

A Communist-Party founding dad with a religious wife produced these hypercapitalist, money-obsessed children. While we spend little time with Rafiq, we see in his fractured family the echoes of bombs exploded before he, let alone they, were born. The cruel and callous world of Empire (anyone's) broke these humans' spirits each in a different way. The hammer blows of being denied your identity as a group, a member of a group, or a person with agency to determine your own course all play out in Rafiq and his family. It does not end happily for them.

Author Ismaïl is a lawyer by training, those people whose profession is predicated on the ability to craft facts into a narrative that persuades others to buy into it. This is a very lawyerly novel, in the best way. It takes information (can't call them facts, exactly, when they're about fictional characters) that can be seen multiple ways...Siver's a gold-digger, Mohammed's a pathetic wannabe, Laika's a solipsistic nihilist...and gives them dimensionality, affords them nuance, build their bases out to admit of different analyses and impressions. Rafiq and Xezal never had a connection worth the name, now he's a downtrodden prole without resources...like the ones he wanted to save...she heads back to her home without him because she can. Come to find out she's not going home. It isn't home, the place; it's home, the state of being, that Xezal and Rafiq never had, never made. It's no surprise their Western-raised kids looked outside themselves to find a core strong enough to build on. And no surprise the entire edifice of family, built on slender reeds and sand, collapsed so spectacularly.

A powerfully affecting examination of the generational consequences stemming from capitalist, imperialist destruction, erroneously called "progress" and "stat-building" to distract from its cruelty and exclusion. I wished I'd had easier transitions between styles of storytelling used in recounting the siblings' life histories; it's a quibble, but it's the reason I can't finish out that fifth star. Just too big a ka-THUNK as I crossed each border.