Ayşegül Savaş is one of the more assured young novelists working today, a writer whose work has been longlisted for major awards (like the National Book Critics Circle award) and received a mention in Barack Obama’s annual year-end list of favorite reads. Yet for all the acclaim, her books are short, subtle, and unassuming.
The young couple at the center of Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, are named Aysa and Manu. Situated in that murky period of life between college and whatever it is we mean by adulthood, they live in the same city as the university where they met. “Back then,” Aysa, who narrates, explains, “we were only playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them.” They spend time with their friend Ravi and coordinate occasional stays from visiting family. Manu works at a nonprofit; Aysa makes documentaries. The bulk of the novel’s narrative is devoted to the couple’s search for their first home, which poignantly captures the ambiguity and excitement, the betweenness of things for twentysomethings starting out. Buying a home literally commits us to the abstractions that prompted the purchase—love, family, security, community. These are all just ideas about the future when you’re young and in love, but the reality of a home—a mortgage, upkeep, the daunting notion of a decades-long payment plan—solidifies what previously had remained tantalizingly ephemeral. During these years before “real life,” as Aysa comments, “the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.”
Their journey into maturation is filled with the kind of melancholy insight only available to those who’ve experienced it. Aysa and Manu are that wonderful mix of hyper-specific and universally relatable, a seeming contradiction on which most great novels thrive. But Savaş goes further: despite the complexities and idiosyncrasies of her characters, Savaş also severs from them details ostensibly as essential to who they are. The city they live in is never named, nor is the country. Nor are Aysa and Manu’s respective home countries, which, we’re told, are “on opposite ends of the world.” None of the people in their orbit—Ravi, their neighbor Tereza, Aysa’s native friend Lena, et al.—are given last names. Throughout, various pieces of media are referenced, but they always come in proper-noun-less descriptions like this:
we watched a movie about a young woman trying to figure out what to do with her life. The film was particularly good at portraying the heroine’s quirks, her self-mumblings, her jokes with her best friend, the little dances she performed alone.
Or, like this: “The album cover was a photograph of the blind musician, his eyes closed, his beard long and sparkling like the Milky Way.” So rare are named references that when they do appear, they almost feel anachronistic. After a sparse handful of mentions that tend toward the classical (the seventeenth-century French playwright Molière, composers Brahms, Dvořák, and Paganini), the sudden references to the Tasmanian Devil and an iPad are a bit jarring.
By now, Savaş has established some themes and techniques that compel her work. Her first novel, Walking on the Ceiling (2019), also explored what it means to be a foreigner, as a woman from Istanbul moves to Paris and meets a British writer known for his novels set in her home city. Proper nouns abound; the targets are too specific to be universalized. As a young Turkish writer, it’s understandable she would contend with literature’s depictions of Istanbul and its culture. Her second novel, White on White (2021), features a young student who moves to a new city for academic purposes, and this time the setting is nameless, as is the narrator. When compared to the technique of her debut, the effect is one of detachment, an aloofness that both seems to reserve judgment of its characters while also not providing them with much tenderness either. In this way, Savaş’s approach recalls Kazuo Ishiguro’s in The Remains of the Day (1989) or Never Let Me Go (2005). Despite both novelists affecting an air of remove, they are both committed to telling insightful human stories with emotional punch. The reserved nature of the narration functions like a tightly wound spring ready to pounce when the dramatic stakes are confronted.
Like her characters, Savaş exists in numerous intersections—born in Istanbul in 1986, she also lived in Denmark before attending college in the U.S. and now resides in Paris. Though her three novels share subjects and themes, she has not repeated herself. She’s capable of touching and profound insights. Aysa explains a small gesture of routine she and Manu perform on work mornings, just the two of them sitting together with coffee before Manu heads out. She says: “There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faith. So these small things mattered.”
The choice to leave out the names of physical locations and other identifiers is common enough in literature, and its benefits, for the novelist, are many. In a purely practical sense, such a setting frees novelists from the realities of the actual place—they needn’t worry over logistics or research or verisimilitude. This also allows them to include aspects in their diegesis that don’t exist anywhere. In The Anthropologists, the characters visit an anthropology museum, a river promenade, and “an abbey outside the city that produced a world-famous beer.” Savaş can evoke the particulars of many cities in one, which relates to the other benefit, which is a kind of universality to Aysa and Manu’s lives. A reader can plug in the specifics from their own history into the vague locations so that the story takes place, in a way, in their memories. This way, when Savaş gives us a line like the following—which comes when Aysa is describing how she and Manu are trying to decide what kind of people they want to be in the future in order to pick the right home to buy—we see the insight in terms of her characters and our own lives: “The process was an act of imaginary acrobatics, trying to launch ourselves forward, with only a guess of where we wanted to land.”
The documentary Aysa makes throughout the novel focuses on the visitors to a park in the city and their relationship to the public space, an anthropological approach that ostensibly lends the book its title. But it is really the couple—young people, generally—who are the anthropologists, as they are tasked with figuring out how adults are supposed to live, information on which they may base some monumental decisions, like, Where do we want to live? What kind of people are we? But the reader, too, is a kind of anthropologist, as we are in any novel, the way we carefully learn the intricacies of various people while constantly (and often unconsciously) comparing their described experiences to our own. In this way, the reader is Aysa and Manu considering their adulthoods and an outside observer considering Aysa and Manu considering their adulthoods.
Savaş’s fiction, like all great fiction, tells stories of transient times in specific yet ordinary lives, which, counterintuitively, is what elevates her novels to something grander and more ambitious than their length may suggest. She can reach into a moment of banal humanity and imbue it with generous wisdom. These small things matter.
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The Anthropologists. By Ayşegül Savaş. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. 192 pp. $24.99.
