The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş review – everyday grace
Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel is an erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love. It opens with a moment of panic, when a married couple decide to start house-hunting. At this point, Asya and Manu have been living together in a foreign, unnamed city in a foreign, unnamed country for several years. We’re told by Asya, a documentary film-maker, that they first met at university, and back then were only “playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them”. On weekends, they would leave the university campus to spend the day in town, among adults whose lives seemed at once real and unreal to them: “real, because that was how we imagined actual life in the abstract; unreal, because it did not seem we would ever be like them”. But now Asya worries that it’s time “to make a life, as some people called it”.
Estrangement – from the city, from society, from the self – lies at the heart of Savaş’s work. Asya and Manu are not like their parents, who live in faraway countries and send dispatches, good and bad. They have a small social circle, but more often than not, it’s just Asya, Manu and their close friend Ravi who spend the days of their lives together – drinking, talking, dreaming. They have few rituals, “certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths”. How, then, does one set down roots, or paint a portrait of a life not blurring at the edges?
The apartment viewings structure the novel and peg the plotline, which is loose at best. These sections are titled “Future Selves”, after the title of Savaş’s short story, the seed for this novel. Alongside the sometimes conflicted search for a home (“If we were to live there, we said, we’d come to this café for lunch and late-night drinks, would know the waiters by name. The thought was pleasing though somewhat foreign as if we’d put on very expensive clothing that didn’t belong to us”), Asya is also putting a recently received grant to good use by filming her local park.
This is not your typical marriage novel, or immigrant/expat novel, or novel of the city – although it threads together all these tropes
The juxtaposition of this public space and the couple’s private spaces and moments is never jarring. Savaş slices through the meat of life, offering slivers titled after various elements of anthropological fieldwork: “Principles of Kinship”, “Inner and Outer Orbits”, “Threshold”, “Present Tense”. The novel exists in the liminalities, distances and tensions between two states or stages of life, and traces the discrepancies between the kinds of adults the characters are and the kinds of adults they were expected to be. What happens when you’re off at a tangent, straying away from the socially accepted trajectory – marriage, house, children? Asya and Manu could very well be a couple in a novel by Sally Rooney or Caleb Azumah Nelson – especially in the ways in which they navigate the city, and are sometimes strangers to themselves and their family. And yet, The Anthropologists is less about relationships, and more about finding the preciousness in the mundane.
Asya’s grandmother and her elderly neighbour Tereza are perfectly formed foils to the young couple: “My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn’t quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn’t want to risk cutting off any vital parts.” Showcasing intergenerational relationships is yet another exercise in dissecting life’s transitions; after all, “grandparents were meant to be old; they were meant to get sick. This was among the sorrows of life for which outsiders were not expected to pause their routines, to inconvenience themselves.” Don’t be deceived by Savaş’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety. “With enough focus, I could probably predict our lives as well, the types of people we would resemble,” says Asya. “There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options.”
This is not your typical marriage novel, or immigrant/expat novel, or novel of the city – although it threads together all these tropes. In writing about “the slow and leisurely rot of a day”, with all its delights and anxieties, and in praising its “unremarkable grace”, as Asya hopes to do with her filming, the author has created something remarkable. Sometimes, there’s beauty in staying where you are, in standing still while the world around you keeps moving – and Savaş paints this still life in a moving world.
• The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is published by Scribner (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
