Review : The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas
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.
Review:
Dear Aysegül Savas,
I do not read a lot of literary fiction these days, so to my shame I never heard of your book prior to listening to the random book blogger on YouTube who sang praises to the story. I largely found the praises very justified – the story felt like music to my eyes and ears. Part of the reason why I do not read a lot of literary fiction though is because I have no idea how to review it. I have it in my head that review of the literary fiction should mostly analyze the language of the story and I am not very capable of doing it. I am able to see the beauty of it in this small, compact book (it has 183 pages on my kindle). I can say that I found the language of the story to be very accessible, but I cannot discuss the nuances of it.
Plot? The blurb mostly gives you all of it. It is about the life of a young couple in the big city. Somehow I decided that City is New York but that’s mostly because I live there and it just gave me the vibe, but it can be any city. The couple are immigrants from two different countries which are also not named, but their life is now here even though they feel connected to their families back home too and sometimes worry that they cannot be there for their family members all the time, that phone calls are not enough, etc.
This is how the story begins
“For many years, it had been just the two of us. When we met, the world expanded and it also contracted: it stretched large enough for the two of us—a whole universe—and it left everything else behind a curtain. We were so young then, barely out of childhood. On weekends, we’d walk off the university campus to spend the day in town, among older people whose lives seemed at once real and unreal. Real, because that was how we imagined actual life in the abstract; unreal, because it did not seem we would ever be like them.
We went to the town bookshop, to the coffee shop, to the record store, even if neither of us knew anything about the type of music sold there: cool and stylish and, to us, exotic. We were scholarship students in a foreign country, which is to say that we recognized something in each other. We’d been raised by similar types of people—their worries, their discipline, their affection, their means—even though we had grown up on opposite ends of the world. We accepted, children that we were, that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived, and we were delighted by the prospect. Back then, it didn’t seem to us that we’d ever need anyone else, in our small world that was also a universe.”
I can quote a lot from it and you know how sometimes you can feel that the writer wants their words to be profound, but they are really not? I felt that this book had that simple wisdom, I don’t know if that makes sense.
I really liked the main characters. Asya narrates the story but I could clearly see her Manu through her eyes. I think this was very much a love story as well – their love story, but also the love story with the city and with the people they considered friends.
And I really appreciated the ending (the fact that it was not tragic!)
Grade: A-
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