The Brooklyn Rail

If you were to take note of an existence, yours or another’s, focusing on the daily particulars that compose a life, likely you would discover how prosaic much of it is. Sleeping, working, chores; seeing friends here and there; admiring flowers, lunch; vacations, sex. Tally them up, all those moments of duty and pleasure, and the details would reveal how routine much of life is, and how long. Even the most painful experiences, like for instance, a grandparent’s gradual decline or a friendship’s fade, can be quite slow and ordinary. Like any other, these moments come and pass in bits, leaving you to continue creating a life and, when possible, find a glimmer amidst what is otherwise bleak and mundane. This is the spirit of Ayşegül Savaş’s latest novel, The Anthropologists. Throughout the story, Savaş strings together daily rituals, random observations, and philosophical musings, revealing how the quiet frictions and splendors of the everyday mold the kind of life one makes for themselves.

Asya is a documentarian who lives with her partner, Manu, in a vibrant city that the two lovers are both foreign to. We never learn the name of the city, but at the start of the story, we become attuned to the couple’s frenzied desire to root themselves in it. After spending time “playing out [their] adulthoods,” the pair developed a yearning “to make things a bit more solid.” This blooming urge to create stability after a certain point in adulthood is normal and even expected, especially since city life is distinctively unstable and ever-changing. Yet, for Asya and Manu, the stakes are a bit different from your run-of-the-mill growing pains. As foreigners to their city, their relationship to it is complex and risky. With loved ones far away in opposite directions of the world, the couple must build a life of their own making, and finding a home is a natural place to start. During their search, Asya and Manu visit apartments for sale and attempt to imagine how their shared life might come together in each place. For them, buying a home is not only about finding a nice apartment in an idyllic location, it is also an eager investigation of how to live. By taking a peek into other people’s lives, the couple is able to see different versions of their potential futures, or, to put it simply, other possibilities of being. “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.” Throughout the novel, different scenes are divided into recurring fragments. These apartment viewings are aptly named “Future Selves.”

Though this apartment hunt is a significant part of this book, it is not necessarily the central concern of the novel. Instead, the focus is put on what happens between the tours: walking through the city, drinking at dingy bars, chatting with family over the phone, loafing in the sun. “Ravi, Manu, and I went to the park for a picnic … We lounged on the grass all day long, going to the kiosk every few hours to get more beers. We left at closing time, when the guards began whistling from every direction.” These tiny moments of meandering and lazing about spur the story forward from one scene to the next, suggesting that events of this brevity bear as much meaning as life’s grander dramas. As a documentarian and anthropologist, these sorts of minor acts or, as Asya likes to call them, “the slow and leisurely rot of a day,” are quite inspiring to her. In fact, her fascination is so acute that she decides to document a city park and its passersby. Some people in her life don’t quite understand the project, seeing the park as too insignificant for documentation, but for Asya, the seeming insignificance is exactly what draws her to film it. And so she does, capturing the park’s many strangers and their eccentricities:

Everyone, it seemed to me, had something truly weird about them, something unique and bizarre. This uniqueness was most apparent in everyday acts, in the banal rather than the extraordinary: the way they picked clothes for the day, the things they ate, how they spent a free hour. This was their compass, it seemed to me, more so than any moral abstraction.

As her gaze goes outward, the readers’ focus goes into Asya’s daily life, her Facetimes with her mother and grandmother, her attempts to make friends and build community, her grappling with being a foreigner, her affection for her partner and the things she questions about her relationship. Much of how she spends her time is relatable and unsurprising, a fact we see her struggle with. At one point, while touring the home of a very quintessential urban family, Asya realizes how foreseeable most people’s paths are, including her own: “With enough focus, I could probably predict our lives as well, the types of people we would resemble. There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options.” For readers, the trajectory of Asya’s life is quite obvious. It is not necessarily what occurs that is captivating, but getting to watch her arrive at these decisions. Our relationship to Asya briefly turns us into anthropologists, taking note of the things that make her unique.

Therein lies the book’s charm and the clarity of Savaş’s intricate weaving. The prose, minimal and elegant, casts a well-rounded vision of existence, making clear that the small, mundane, day-to-day details are a large part of what makes a life. Yet, for every chiseled detail there is to notice, it is also interesting to consider the things Savaş does not bring to focus. For instance, despite taking place in a city, the story doesn’t discuss the harsher realities of city life which, at certain points, can make the perspective feel a bit too romanticized. This isn’t to say the story lacks complexity or depth. There is an ambient anxiety about climate change and xenophobia, as well as moments of interpersonal tension and melancholy, all of which saves the narrative from being rose-tinted and suggests that Savaş doesn’t mean to ignore life’s darkness. Instead, like the most lovely parts of the novel, it looms between the story. This is the world of The Anthropologists: slow and quiet, existing finely within the details.