asianamlitfans | A Review of Aysegül Savas’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’m lucky to be part of a little reading group with some brilliant folx, and this year’s selection is none other than Aysegül Savas’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). Occasionally, at AALF, we look a little bit further eastward and such is the case with Savas, who is a Turkish anglophone writer who lives in Paris! In any case, her novel is an interesting one because it functions partly through general abstracts, which is certainly one of Savas’s aims: “Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. ‘Forget about daily life,’ chides her grandmother on the phone. ‘We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.’ Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas' distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.”

This official marketing description is super useful because of the quotation provided by the grandmother! Part of the whole point of this novel is to document the ordinary and the quotidian, even in the abstract. There’s something that Saval is wrestling with here about evacuating the text with particularity and even historical and cultural specificity. Readers are never given an exact sense of where the story is set (which city is it in?) or the ethnicity of specific characters (though we know, for instance, that Manu and Asya are foreigners, as are many of their friends). Don’t expect food references to help you, as Savas also declines specifying too many of the foods. The only area where I thought we might get a glimpse of where we actually are is when a character mentions needing a residential permit and that this document might limit their movements in and out of the city, but my knowledge of urban centers is extremely limited. In any case, this book meanders and is reflective and seems more philosophical. It is not driven by plot, though there are three main strands. The first involves the repeated sections titled “future selves,” which focuses on Asya and Manu, as their tour properties to find a more permanent place to level. The second involves the documentary that Asya is making which is contained more or less to the sections called “in the park.” Asya is clearly focusing on the ways that community is forged in the unnamed park location. These sections are again pretty pedestrian, but that, I think, is part of the point: to find some semblance of what is important about the ordinary and the everyday. The final repeated sections, “Principles of Kinship,” were probably my favorite because it details the complications of developing alternative community formations beyond heteronuclear structures. In this novel’s case, Asya and Manu have one clear close friend named Ravi, but around that major friend, a number of others orbit, including Lena; Tereza, an elderly neighbor; and a handful of others. The heft of the novel, at least for me, appears here, and I will provide the spoiler warning. Have you looked away? Well, if not, then it means you either already know or don’t care: the ending leaves us in a situation where Manu and Asya do find their new place, while Ravi moves away with one of their other friends, leaving behind the fledgling kinship that they hoped would endure. The documentary doesn’t seem to be a major element to the conclusion, so the novel really leaves us with the connections that people make as they grow older. The novel makes you wonder about the endurance of these non-heteronuclear family formations we attempt to make, especially in the guise of migrant communities. Overall, Savas’s work seems almost to be less of a novel than a series of vignettes, which the intent to show the complications of the immigrant everyday. An intriguing and spare narrative.

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