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My Sister Chaos
The story of twin sisters who escape from an unknown, war-torn country, this novel follows an obsessive-compulsive cartographer trapped in the mapping of her own house and a painter turned code-breaker trying to find the female lover she lost in the war. While the cartographer is obsessed with keeping the world in order---her sister's unexpected visit is equated with a sign of chaos---her sister has a firm grip on the real world and, perhaps, a greater sense of order. Presented within a world of obsession and trauma, this narrative explores whether anyone is immune to the forces of destruction.
204 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2010
2 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Lara Fergus
1 bookLara Fergus grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and gave up a science degree to become a contemporary dancer. Some years and an ankle injury later she gave that up to see the world and wash dishes. She spent seven years living overseas, mostly in France. In that time she completed degrees in writing, women’s studies and international law, and worked with various advocacy organisations, including for newly arrived immigrant and refugee women.
She has now worked as a researcher and writer on human rights—particularly violence against women—for over a decade, with organisations such as Amnesty International, White Ribbon, VicHealth and most recently the United Nations. She currently works for the Victorian Government on policy to prevent violence against women. She lives in Melbourne with her partner Maryse, writes before work and dances on the weekends. My Sister Chaos is her first novel.
She has now worked as a researcher and writer on human rights—particularly violence against women—for over a decade, with organisations such as Amnesty International, White Ribbon, VicHealth and most recently the United Nations. She currently works for the Victorian Government on policy to prevent violence against women. She lives in Melbourne with her partner Maryse, writes before work and dances on the weekends. My Sister Chaos is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 18, 2020
This is a highly inventive work of fiction that bends reality, centering otherness (as experienced by refugees, dissidents, queer women) in a challenge to our systems of representation of the political/personal. Fergus employs cartographic and mathematical metaphors to expand the realm of emotions, of what is and what could be. I often had a catch in my breath, in my throat, quiet epiphanies. Unfortunately, these metaphors sometimes get caught in their own minutiae, in the practical belabouring of their details, which can get frustrating. While this does sometimes detract from the experience of the book, as a whole, at its core, this is a powerfully moving book about sisterhood and the politics of love and belonging. Absolutely worth spending some intense time with.
November 21, 2013
This novel is amazing. The slow, anxious tone is incredible, minimalist dialogue with so many witty one-liners and a deeply interesting analysis of life, psychology and coping with trauma.
November 24, 2018
A mysterious and vivid read, My Sister Chaos describes unnamed sisters, from an unnamed country, relocated to a new unnamed country where they adjust in different ways. The two are simple contrasts of each other, an obsessive and neurotic cartographer who maps her new home incessantly and her artist sister mourning her lover and her radical community in their old war-torn country. The anonymity makes it an any man's tale, that this could be any country in the recent past or future and the struggle of both freedom and control in coping with change. The sisters become chaos to each other in order to cope with the traumas of the past and their relocation.
November 26, 2024
It is a book that resonates in our turbulent times. A story of displacement and the search for a new sense of place and belonging.
August 14, 2016
My Sister Chaos is a remarkable feat of creativity. Set in an unnamed country with three female characters known only as the cartographer, the sister and the mathematician, it tells a story of love that transcends a chaos that few of us could possibly imagine. The novel won the 2012 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was nominated for Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction (2012), and the Dobbie Literary Award(2011).
The story begins with the cartographer obsessively mapping her house. She has been separated from her sole surviving relative, her sister, since they fled civil war in their home country and her sister abandoned her in the motel where they had been placed as refugees. The cartographer had been employed on a high level project mapping her country, but now she works at a lower level because even though she has learned the language of her new country, others have made assumptions about her competence. She makes sense of traumatic experiences that are gradually revealed by bringing order to her house. Nothing can be disturbed because that would interfere with the mapping process. It becomes clear to the reader that the cartographer has a warped sense of reality because of all that she has been through.
What complicates her mapping process is that her map is rather like the kind of maps I heard about this weekend at the Bendigo Writers Festival in a session with Kim Mahood. Mahood has just published what sounds like a fascinating book called Position Doubtful (which I have on order from Readings so I haven’t read it yet). In conversation with Susan Martin, she talked about the complexity of maps which incorporate both space, time and story. At its most simple, a topographically correct map can show using colour as a legend the shifting edges of a lake at different times in its flood cycle. Mahood develops her maps through negotiation with the indigenous owners of the land, and you can see one of these maps which depicts a fire path here. The map takes into account the intensity of the fire, and it also depicts a spiritual being. Although it’s topographically correct, it’s not about horizon and perspective…
In My Sister Chaos the cartographer’s map is not just a scale drawing of her house. She has set up a drafting table as her Point of Beginning in an otherwise empty room and using compasses she draws from that point to create her map. Theoretically, this means that, from her Point of Beginning, she will measure every little distance and angle to map the entirety of the house, nothing added, nothing omitted. She is determined to include every change, level and movement, and as the story unfolds, she encounters conceptual difficulties in accommodating chaotic change she wasn’t expecting and which threatens her fragile sense of security.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/08/14/m...
The story begins with the cartographer obsessively mapping her house. She has been separated from her sole surviving relative, her sister, since they fled civil war in their home country and her sister abandoned her in the motel where they had been placed as refugees. The cartographer had been employed on a high level project mapping her country, but now she works at a lower level because even though she has learned the language of her new country, others have made assumptions about her competence. She makes sense of traumatic experiences that are gradually revealed by bringing order to her house. Nothing can be disturbed because that would interfere with the mapping process. It becomes clear to the reader that the cartographer has a warped sense of reality because of all that she has been through.
What complicates her mapping process is that her map is rather like the kind of maps I heard about this weekend at the Bendigo Writers Festival in a session with Kim Mahood. Mahood has just published what sounds like a fascinating book called Position Doubtful (which I have on order from Readings so I haven’t read it yet). In conversation with Susan Martin, she talked about the complexity of maps which incorporate both space, time and story. At its most simple, a topographically correct map can show using colour as a legend the shifting edges of a lake at different times in its flood cycle. Mahood develops her maps through negotiation with the indigenous owners of the land, and you can see one of these maps which depicts a fire path here. The map takes into account the intensity of the fire, and it also depicts a spiritual being. Although it’s topographically correct, it’s not about horizon and perspective…
In My Sister Chaos the cartographer’s map is not just a scale drawing of her house. She has set up a drafting table as her Point of Beginning in an otherwise empty room and using compasses she draws from that point to create her map. Theoretically, this means that, from her Point of Beginning, she will measure every little distance and angle to map the entirety of the house, nothing added, nothing omitted. She is determined to include every change, level and movement, and as the story unfolds, she encounters conceptual difficulties in accommodating chaotic change she wasn’t expecting and which threatens her fragile sense of security.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/08/14/m...
November 12, 2016
I chanced across Lara Fergus's first novel, My Sister Chaos, while browsing. Intrigued by the title and cover art, I downloaded a preview. Within a few pages, I was hooked.
My Sister Chaos, is an intense story of twin sisters living as refugees from genocide. The main character, a cartographer, has found work in her profession and settled down alone. Her obsession with her project to map the house she rents in excruciating accuracy, retreating into a bubble which she can know completely and rationally, mirrors her emotionless self-control.
The story begins when her sister, who ran away shortly after they gained refugee status, returns, asking to crash at her house. As the obsessively organized sister struggles to maintain control and stability against intrusion of her emotional, artistic, and undisciplined twin, the story ricochets back and forth between their memories, telling of their different experiences as their native country collapsed around them.
The first chapter starts "The house is lit up when I arrive home" and these descriptions of the house as dark or lit begin every chapter, establishing a rhythm which kept me spellbound.
Lara Fergus has apparently worked as human rights researcher and advocate for immigrants and refugees, and her knowledge shows in her writing. She conveys a powerful sense of the difficulty of understanding someone who has gone through trauma beyond your own experience.
Most of the story is told in first person from the main character's perspective. However, her factual, almost clinical descriptions of her own thoughts and the simple confidence with which she analyzes the perspectives of those around her, made me feel a distance from her, despite being privy to her thoughts, as though I was trying to make out someone hidden behind the reflection in a window. The author establishes a similar distance with the sister's story, by telling it in the third person, referring to her as "the sister" and to her lover as "the sister's lover". In fact, not a single character in the book is ever named, nor is their native country, though the events seem most consistent with the war in Bosnia. Though the description is sparing, rather than graphic, the novel does touch on the horrors suffered by civilian women in that conflict.
As long as you can handle those subjects, appreciate an intense character study, and don't expect a pat resolution, you'll find My Sister Chaos well worth your time
My Sister Chaos, is an intense story of twin sisters living as refugees from genocide. The main character, a cartographer, has found work in her profession and settled down alone. Her obsession with her project to map the house she rents in excruciating accuracy, retreating into a bubble which she can know completely and rationally, mirrors her emotionless self-control.
The story begins when her sister, who ran away shortly after they gained refugee status, returns, asking to crash at her house. As the obsessively organized sister struggles to maintain control and stability against intrusion of her emotional, artistic, and undisciplined twin, the story ricochets back and forth between their memories, telling of their different experiences as their native country collapsed around them.
The first chapter starts "The house is lit up when I arrive home" and these descriptions of the house as dark or lit begin every chapter, establishing a rhythm which kept me spellbound.
Lara Fergus has apparently worked as human rights researcher and advocate for immigrants and refugees, and her knowledge shows in her writing. She conveys a powerful sense of the difficulty of understanding someone who has gone through trauma beyond your own experience.
Most of the story is told in first person from the main character's perspective. However, her factual, almost clinical descriptions of her own thoughts and the simple confidence with which she analyzes the perspectives of those around her, made me feel a distance from her, despite being privy to her thoughts, as though I was trying to make out someone hidden behind the reflection in a window. The author establishes a similar distance with the sister's story, by telling it in the third person, referring to her as "the sister" and to her lover as "the sister's lover". In fact, not a single character in the book is ever named, nor is their native country, though the events seem most consistent with the war in Bosnia. Though the description is sparing, rather than graphic, the novel does touch on the horrors suffered by civilian women in that conflict.
As long as you can handle those subjects, appreciate an intense character study, and don't expect a pat resolution, you'll find My Sister Chaos well worth your time
September 15, 2012
A brilliant, harrowing first novel that won the Publishing Triangle's Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. It's about two sisters in an unnamed country (that seems like Australia, since that's where the author's from) who are refugees from another unnamed country that has been torn apart by civil war (think Yugoslavia). One sister, the unreliable narrator, is a cartographer and an obsessive compulsive. Her twin, a lesbian painter who lost her lover in their homeland during the madness, shows up. At first our sympathies lie with the narrator--but as we learn more about what happened in their native country, and how each woman has coped with the trauma, it all becomes much more complicated. And the ending reminded me, in its emotional tenor, of Roman Polanski's Repulsion.
March 24, 2016
This was a beautiful book, albeit a little confusing and frustrating at times. The narrator's obsession with mapping her house made some sense as a response to the trauma of a war that changed the borders of her country, but sometimes I couldn't quite get into her mindset. I liked how towards the end it sometimes seemed unclear whether the two sisters were healing or losing their minds. It reminded me of the Yellow Wallpaper in that it was narrated by someone whose perspective on the world is increasingly narrowly focused and losing touch with reality, yet she feels like she is making progress towards improving something.
May 31, 2012
Loved this tale of twin refugees from an unnamed country, one a cartographer with perhaps Asperger Syndrome and/or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the other a lesbian painter. The former is the narrator, and the latter is called only "the sister." The sister has lost her lover and lover's child in the war. She left her more emotionally handicapped sister when they reached America, and has just returned to her sister's house.
This Borgesian story of identity and of PTSD is worthy of its status as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT writing. Hope it wins!
This Borgesian story of identity and of PTSD is worthy of its status as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT writing. Hope it wins!
April 3, 2013
It's a good thing I have a book group, so I can recommend this novel and hope that others will discuss it with me. As one of the blurb writers said, it's "Intriguing, intelligent and highly original." It will change forever how I think about refugees (and maps). But I don't know what to make of it, entirely, and I sure don't know how to comment here without creating spoilers.
The main character appears to be asexual, a queer sexuality not often encountered in literature; the next-to-main character is lesbian.
The main character appears to be asexual, a queer sexuality not often encountered in literature; the next-to-main character is lesbian.
September 4, 2013
Despite my rating, it's actually very well written. It's just I found myself unable to relate to the characters except in the flashbacks. But in the present, the thinking driving the main character's masterwork just eluded me.
November 11, 2011
My god, does this book need a proper review. Coming soon.
For now: shelved as ecstasy.
For now: shelved as ecstasy.
March 31, 2013
Engrossing - very quirky - loved it
April 29, 2015
An interesting perspective on universal trauma through the eyes of one of its victims.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews