The Sisters

As the eldest of the Mikkola sisters, Ina functions as the family’s reluctant and anxious matriarch. Her defining traits are a need for control, a deep-seated responsibility for her sisters, and a longing for stability. Having been forced into a parental role at a young age due to her mother’s erratic behavior, she develops a personality organized around planning, practicality, and risk aversion. This makes her a foil to her more spontaneous and chaotic younger sisters. Her meticulous organization, from color-coding her spice rack to creating chore schedules, is a defense mechanism against the unpredictable world she grew up in. Beneath her capable and often stern exterior, however, lies a deep loneliness and a feeling of being an outsider, even within her own family.

Ina is a dynamic and round character whose arc centers on her struggle to let go of control and accept life’s inherent messiness. Her relationship with Hector is a catalyst for this change. With him, she experiences a stable love that challenges her deep-seated fear that everything she cares about will be taken from her, a direct manifestation of the family curse. While this relationship provides the normalcy she craves, its eventual collapse forces her into a new state of vulnerability. By the end of the novel, her life has been upended by Primo’s troubles and her divorce, leading her to move in with Anastasia. This role reversal, where she becomes dependent on her younger sister, is a significant shift, forcing her to abandon her lifelong role as the sole caregiver and accept the support of the family she fought so hard to protect.

Evelyn, the middle sister, is the family’s enigmatic charmer, a magnetic and captivating figure who uses her storytelling ability and social grace as a shield. Her character is defined by a deep-seated restlessness and a fear of commitment, which manifest in a series of fleeting relationships and a decade-long tenure at a job she claims to despise. She’s a performative character, constantly crafting anecdotes and presenting a version of herself that keeps others entertained but emotionally distant. This performance is a survival tactic learned in childhood to navigate their unstable home life. While she appears confident and carefree, her inability to settle or finish anything, from relationships to her final monologue at drama school, reveals a deep fear of being trapped by her choices.

Evelyn’s development is driven by her desire to escape her past and find an authentic self. Her decision to attend acting school is a key moment, an attempt to channel her performative instincts into a genuine art form. However, her ultimate act is one of flight. After confronting the depths of her pain and anger in New York, she chooses to disappear, severing ties with her family and her old life. This act can be interpreted as both the curse’s ultimate fulfillment (losing her family, the thing she loves) and her final, radical attempt to break free from it. Her quest to verify the family myth about Rockefeller Center symbolizes her search for a more heroic and affirmative identity than the one she inherited through the family curse. By the end, she chooses an ambiguous resolution, embracing the opportunity to free herself and her sisters from the curse, even if it means abandoning the anonymity and freedom she enjoyed in New York.

The youngest sister, Anastasia, is the family’s volatile and creative rebel. Characterized by her impulsivity, artistic sensibility, and fierce loyalty, she navigates life with a raw energy that often leads her into self-destructive patterns, including drug use and volatile relationships. Yet beneath her chaotic exterior is a powerful resilience and a deep-seated need to protect the people she loves. She’s the sister who is most overtly artistic, but she struggles to channel her creativity, perpetually collecting ideas but fearing the follow-through of a formal application or project. Her journey is a search for an outlet for her intense emotions and a stable sense of purpose.

Anastasia is a dynamic and round character who undergoes the most dramatic external transformations. She moves from being an unemployed artist to a highly successful advertising executive, a role that harnesses her disruptive energy but ultimately leaves her unfulfilled. Her eventual turn toward art conservation with Mathias shows a more mature and meaningful integration of her talents. Her relationships reflect this trajectory: Her time with Mathias is defined by mutual destruction, while her later relationships with Åhdal and Daniela signify a move toward stability and genuine connection. Despite her rebellious nature, she’s often the emotional glue of the family, mediating between her older sisters and confronting their shared trauma, as when she reads her mother’s notebooks and later orchestrates the trip to New York. Her journey is about taming her inner chaos without extinguishing her creative fire.

Selima is the matriarch of the Mikkola family and the source of the intergenerational trauma that defines her daughters’ lives. She’s a charismatic figure whose identity is built on a foundation of paranoia, flight, and fear. Her belief in the family curse, which dictates that “everything [they] love too much will be taken away from [them]” (185), becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that she enforces through a life of constant upheaval, moving her children from town to town to escape a perceived malevolent force. While she’s often physically and emotionally absent, working as a traveling salesperson, her presence looms large, shaping her daughters’ anxieties and their approaches to relationships and stability.

Selima is a static character in her influence, as her core beliefs and behaviors remain consistent until her death. However, she’s also round, revealed through her notebooks to be a more complex figure than her daughters knew, a woman who wrote poetry and grappled with her own pain. The revelation that she stole her sister’s identity and passport to escape Tunisia adds an important layer to her psychology. This act of theft and reinvention explains her paranoia and her desperate need to keep moving, recasting her as a woman fleeing her past. She embodies the novel’s exploration of how personal histories, both real and imagined, are passed down and re-enacted by the next generation.

Jonas’s father is a key figure whose absence and criticism are the primary sources of Jonas’s lifelong trauma. In Jonas’s memory, he is a charismatic but deeply flawed man, embodying an archetypal absent father. His life is a story of unfulfilled potential; he dreams of wealth and success but drifts between jobs as a bartender and subway driver, his grand ambitions constantly thwarted. His experience of depression, triggered by illness and personal failures, leads him to abandon his family, leaving behind a legacy of emotional wounds and a critical voice that Jonas internalizes as “the Hyena.”

His role in the novel is twofold. First, he is the catalyst for Jonas’s internal conflict, representing a past that Jonas both fears repeating and desperately seeks to understand. This struggle is a central part of the theme of Breaking Cycles of Intergenerational Trauma. Second, he serves as the mysterious link between Jonas and the Mikkola sisters. His past relationship with Selima and his later role as a temporary guardian for Anastasia in Tunisia create a web of connections that fuels Jonas’s obsessive quest to intertwine their stories. Despite his physical absence for much of the narrative, his influence remains a powerful and haunting presence.

Hector is a grounding force in the novel, primarily serving as a romantic partner who offers Ina a glimpse of a different, more stable kind of life. He’s an intellectual, kind, and patient man from a large, loving, and overtly communicative family, providing a contrast to the Mikkola sisters’ chaotic and repressed upbringing. As a character, he acts as an anchor for Ina, providing the security that allows her to begin confronting her deep-seated anxieties about love and stability. His decision to start the underground publishing house Slakthuset reveals his own intellectual and rebellious streak, suggesting a complexity beyond his role as the perfect boyfriend.

However, Hector isn’t a static figure. His affair with Klara is a significant turning point in his arc, shattering the stable world that he and Ina built and reinforcing the Mikkola family pattern of broken relationships. This act reveals his own vulnerabilities and flaws, making him a more rounded character and demonstrating that even those from perfect families are capable of causing deep pain. His journey complicates the idea that a stable background is a guarantee of a stable life.

Simon is a successful and charismatic human-rights lawyer who enters Evelyn’s life after a chance meeting at the aquarium. He shows a potential future for Evelyn that is both enticing and threatening: a life of stability, success, and deep emotional connection. On the surface, he appears to be a perfect partner, but his relationship with Evelyn is fraught with a tension that stems from their shared intensity and his underlying need for control. His arguments with Evelyn over small things like cats, pens, and phone plans are symbolic of their larger power struggle and Evelyn’s fierce resistance to being defined or managed by anyone.

As their relationship progresses, a darker, more aggressive side of Simon is revealed, particularly in his sexual relationship with Evelyn. Her confession that she must leave him because she’s drawn to his aggression highlights the destructive nature of their bond. His character serves to illuminate Evelyn’s deepest fears about intimacy and her complex relationship with love and pain. His eventual marriage to Cecilia, Evelyn’s former best friend, emphasizes the novel’s ideas on the tangled, often painful, ways in which lives intersect and diverge.