I Decided To Hold Onto It: On Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists”
Ayşegül Savaş | The Anthropologists | Bloomsbury Publishing| July 2024| 192 Pages
Early on in Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, the narrator, Asya, remembers a college professor’s advice to consider the mundane routines of daily life as subject for anthropological study. A young documentarian expat living in an unnamed foreign city with her husband, Manu, Asya imagines the “tiny anthropologist” hovering near, “taking notes on a flip chart,” when the days feel particularly aimless. “Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.” It is through the eyes of an external observer, Asya understands, the translation of drifting time into recognizable patterns and sentences, that a life’s purpose coheres.
“…my life must be a legend,” writes Jean Genet in A Thief’s Journal, “in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry.” Like the narrator of Genet’s novel whose abject poverty and ostracization from society are imbued with purpose via their translation into the novel’s narrative, so too is the chaotic boredom of Asya’s life made into a solid thing, into poetry. Life itself is flimsy and nebulous regardless of how carefully it may seem to follow a traditional trajectory; it is art that invents solidity, progression, beauty—art shapes, art names. In the world of the novel, Asya is drifting; in the novel I hold in my hands—in its readers, its sculpted arc, the translation of drifting into sentences about drifting—she becomes real. (And we could, too—“our little life,” we’d say just like they do in the story; I could describe our blue couch, all my coats weighing down the hooks you nailed to the wall; “poor baby,” we’d say, “tell me everything,” we’d say, “it’s you and me,” we’d say; I could make it nameable and solid, recorded history, nailed to the past though it’s now empty space.)
The Anthropologists is mostly uneventful, contented and meandering: it is a quiet book of vignettes and loose observations, often and effortlessly slipping into first-person plural, never quite reaching any conclusions. At its center is Asya’s apprehensive, consistent—though not immediately pressing—desire to establish a sense of solidity, or “sturdiness” in her life. As foreigners to each other, the couple’s life lacks “a shared native tongue, […] religion, […] the web of family and its obligations,” all of which Asya considers essential tenets of adulthood, the elements that hold a person in place. Without these traditional routines and checkpoints, Asya and Manu have only their inside jokes, their morning coffee, “the rot of the day.”Asya seems unsure that this is enough, though these gestures create over the course of the novel a certain pattern, a definite shape.
The couple begins to shop for their first home “in a moment of panic”—an attempt to manufacture a container for their lives; to create, in some ways, a distinct narrative and fall into its arc. The couple travels to distant corners of the city to view apartments, each one offering a different glimpse of their future, the potentialities contained therein, their possible “future selves,” as these scenes are titled. Afterward, Asya and Manu have a habit of settling down at a nearby cafe to debrief. They rarely come to any conclusions, instead allowing passivity and distraction to carry them into a future in which the passage of time and the lull of indecision becomes a choice in itself–an unspoken agreement to continue looking, observing, hovering over their futures without quite knowing where they’d like to land.
The apartment tours take on the patterned glean of ritual, another phrase to add to Manu and Asya’s reiterative life: drinking coffee together; the interviews Asya films with strangers at the park; family members on phone screens; drinking in dive bars; reading poetry with an elderly neighbor. The novel seems to refute Asya’s fear of life’s shapelessness in these subtle descriptions, these quiet and understated moments; to translate an inside joke, a casual dinner, the ebb and flow of anxiety into language on the page is to make it a shaped thing, a real thing. (Asya and Manu’s quiet, easy camaraderie seemed familiar to me, at least in a certain light. Sometimes I thought we were just like them. We were Ts too, their tender nickname for “two people who were in love, who were a little sad, a little misfortunate, who had always been somewhat clumsy and lonely,” and maybe all that really mattered was a shared lexicon and “that we did not consider each other strange,” and maybe we could have worked, maybe we should have, maybe there was still time for us. In my notebook I erased the sentence so I wouldn’t mistake it for the truth.)
Still, Savaş’s deft descriptions somehow impart both significance and weightlessness to the minute details that make up these characters’ lives. “Instead of the framed posters we’d had since university, we hung paintings we’d bought at the flea market: a plate of fruits, a port scene at sunset. We liked the paintings, yes, but we also liked what they might mean about us–people with real paintings on their walls.” What does it mean to be these people? Savaş is more interested in that which is describable, allowing such abstractions to remain mere glimmers beneath the objects of reality. Every detail is poignant and holds the potential to mean something more than itself, something essential and true, and then it’s gone, replaced by some new observation. “Looking at the [old] couple with their drooping outfits, I could see another way to live,” Asya says, and then: “When the waiter came, I suggested having pastries with our coffees.” All these alternate ways of living humming beneath the one chosen. And yet these descriptions never transcend themselves; the gaze remains pointed at the image itself, with only vague gestures toward symbolic value. Asya describes seeing a recurring neighborhood character whom she calls the Old Dame sitting outside a café: “I couldn’t tell immediately what about this image compelled me, but I decided to hold onto it.” It’s not some overarching point or purpose that makes the image meaningful, but that it is described. Description itself grants the image meaning–and what vibrates indescribably, silently within it.
While the meandering nature of their lives, their lack of direction, their drifting worries Asya, it neither overwhelms her nor culminates. The days go on, and the hours. At times Asya’s anxiety becomes more acute, a claustrophobia within the perceived wrongness of her life which causes her to argue with Manu or grow resentful over the course of a plotless weekend spent eating and drinking with the couple’s friend, Ravi. Then it passes. A new day. Asya and Manu have coffee together in the morning. There is a constant sense of foreboding, a looming tension—Asya’s grandmother’s health declines, the couple holds grudges, Asya’s friendships offer little solace or sense of belonging in her adopted city—but it’s neither urgent nor particularly consequential. There is no singular point, no piercing moment or peak. Rather, every detail is precise; every detail is the point. The question of how to live is not, after all, entirely answerable. It’s a fear that exists alongside Asya’s daily life, constantly relevant and also shifting, receding, remaining, humming. Chekhov’s gun isn’t always firing; sometimes it’s just the small, insignificant moments that happen in the meantime, described with clarity and grace, pinpricks of tenderness, the levity of a vignette that passes, that means nothing, that means everything, that exists.
The difference between existing and not existing, between a real life and an unreal one, as the novel suggests and, too, as Asya’s filmmaking subtly outlines, has to do with description, a record, witnessing. The “rules” Asya is constantly referencing are abstract and undefined, undefinable, and to break them is less a deviation from whatever normal traditions of living exist and more the pervasive impossibility of understanding one’s own unwritten life in the context of such indecipherable rules–one must write one’s own life to establish its rules. For the habitual encounters of one’s quiet days to have a witness—to be observable, recognized amidst the chaos of passing minutes, to be translated into language—abolishes the potential for wrongness by giving shape to these abstract experiences. Of course there is no right way to live; there are only the ways we know, the ways we have narrativized, told. (This is about you again, unavoidably, as everything is about you lately, or still. How making it about you protects me from the blank void of beyond you, a place where I have no outline but absence. Lately or still I cling to the definitions you gave me, the shape of one person alongside another.) In the end, this novel is about what every novel is about: we tell ourselves stories in order to live, et cetera.
To venerate the regular passing of an hour is to hold onto it, to forbid its regular passing, imbue it with complexity. Mostly this is the point of art. But then doesn’t art in some way betray life in its failure to accurately portray it? I suppose we just can’t help but go on trying and failing to say what we mean. In The Anthropologists, the levity of Savaş’s observations, her short sentences and simple grammar, gets as close to mimicking the “creamy and snug and exact” nature of one quiet corner of a city and a life without totally sacrificing style as seems possible. The lightness of opening up a single uneventful moment into and among the ongoing stream of time and events, relationships and things. To write a ritual is to convey the ongoingness of that ritual, the whole world that exists outside the text, and for each of us, private and irretrievable, beyond language. One moment among many, an hour replaced by the next one. Recorded or not, made beautiful, made patterned and real, made right—or not. “I’d begun to understand that there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day.” (Inevitably, irrevocably onward.)