Older Brother

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Older Brother by Mahir Guven

A small family clinging to connection in a fractured modern reality grows smaller and more fragmented in this bitter, engrossing, and incisive debut novel. The tale is told in turns by two Franco-Syrian brothers living in the outskirts of Paris. The predominant narrator is Older Brother, an Uber driver and former drug dealer disenchanted with the prejudices and hypocrisies of life in France for anyone other than the white elite. His sharp and somewhat unreliable narration is interspersed with rarer accounts from the perspective of Younger Brother, whose style is more tender and introspective. Younger Brother’s choices seem baffling to Older Brother: first he becomes passionate about religion, then he doggedly pursues a career as a nurse, and finally, defying the understanding of his family and community, he leaves to serve as a medic in Syria. At once a war story, a jaded portrayal of everyday working life, an engrossing thriller, and a fragmented tale made surreal through the wavy lens of drugs, Older Brother is an uncomfortable and revelatory read. The novel doesn’t do any favors to its central characters, showing them as casually and unappealingly misogynistic and transphobic, escapist, and selfish. At the same time, this penchant for an outlook unclouded by idealism is precisely what makes the novel capable of showcasing societies failures and ills so clearly.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: war, terrorism, descriptions of violence, misogyny, transphobia