Book review | This is the “girl fear”, which almost all women recognize

Novel

Kamila Shamsie: Best of Friends. Finnish Cristina Sandu. Rubber. 336 pp.

Kamila Shamsie does not disappoint. For his fifth novel translated into Finnish, the author, born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1973, who has since settled in London, again draws from what he knows best: the choices, adaptation and shaping of identity of a person growing up under the cross pressure of different cultures.

In special consideration are power and morality.

The best of friends tells about the friendship between Zahra and Maryam, who live as teenagers in Karachi, Pakistan in the 1980s. Zahra’s father is a sports reporter specializing in cricket who hosts his own television show, Maryam’s family has a leather business that bears the family name.

Zahra is a conscientious and talented student, but Maryam’s ambition is not on the same level – as the daughter of a rich family, her future is secured even without success in school.

A turning point at the beginning of the novel is a 35-year-old Benazir Bhutto election as the country’s prime minister in 1988. Bhutto was once the youngest and first female prime minister of Islamic countries.

This momentarily seems to open a new kind of future, a window of new possibilities for the girls in the novel.

At the same time as the girls sense the changing political reality, their growth is dominated by the conflict between their own awakening sexuality and desire and the demands of respectability on them.

Astutely, Shamsie describes the confusion that the teenage girl’s changing body causes in herself and in the environment. How to be in a situation where the grandfather has a condescending attitude to the breasts standing out from under the shirt – which were not there before? How to deal with the sensation caused by a school friend’s light touch on the hip?

In large part the growth of friendships is girl fear, the author’s term for the paralyzing feeling that overshadows the growth of girls. The sense of threat that some boys and men play with when they realize that they can use it to exercise power tarnishes the girl’s reputation, which is cherished by the girls’ families.

As a girl and a woman who lived through adolescence in Finland in the same decade, I understand the great cultural difference that separates myself and the friends in the novel. Still, I recognize the fear of girls and I believe that almost all jobs and women in the world recognize it.

What varies greatly is the moral framework within which the girl child can and is allowed to act.

However, globalization has done its job. As different as the growing environments are, the friends in the novel listen to the 1980s in Karachi Michael Jackson and George Michael just like the author of the review. An anecdote like this acts as a strong bridge between the reader and the characters in the novel.

This if which is different: for fans of the novel, just sitting in a stranger’s car when leaving a party is fatal. That choice has far-reaching consequences for the lives of both girls, and Shamsie builds a large part of the plot of her work around it.

Both women’s paths lead to London before long, for different reasons. The shared experiences of their youth keep them together, even if their worlds of values ​​differ from each other.

Maryam is attracted by business, Zahra by a sense of justice and improving the world. Maryam ends up working in a management position at a large social media application, Zahra as the head of a human rights organization.

Through the professions of successful women who exercise power in their own fields, Shamsie gets access to many great phenomena of our time: the protection and insecurity of privacy in social media, the fragile legal protection of immigrants and the almost non-existent opportunities to decide their own future.

One novel an important gift is in its ability to show how society’s morals and justice treat the people of the world differently. I, a Finnish woman of my age, have been able to search for my limits, break them, make mistakes, search, make mistakes and choose without major consequences.

Shamsie gives another, clear insight into power and shows how it can be distributed and displayed in different ways between different ages, different backgrounds or different genders. And again: what are the consequences of using power.