Aysegül Savaş' third novel, The Anthropologists, follows a young couple, Asya and Manu, living in an unnamed city, navigating interpersonal relationships while attempting to orient their own emergent adulthood in relation to somewhat attenuated familial ties. The novel's composition is grounded in a limited third-person focused on Asya as she undertakes a documentary film project, divided structurally into brief vignetted chapters. Much like Savaş' earlier work, The Anthropologists displays a deep concern with physical space juxtaposed with a swiftness of movement, a connection that, here, inaugurates a concern, on the part of both novel and character, with rules, value, and meaning.
This conversation was held in Paris in June 2024 and has been edited for clarity and length.
D. W. White:
One thing I really found interesting in this book is the idea of rules and language, and perhaps also the way in which it connects to place. In White on White, I remember we had some of this type of investigation, although don't remember it as being quite as to the fore of the narrator's account. In this project, it struck me that that's a broadly Wittgensteinian grappling with the rules of language, and then (taking that a step further, into the novel), the language of rules, and the navigational demands they impose on daily life. I'm curious about that nexus, specifically in a compositional sense.
And then, how that maps onto a sense of self. I thought that issue was drawn out well in our narrator, allowing for the book to be as concerned as it is with shifting identities; a permanent shifting that's reified in language and, it seems, is the world—but then which actually becomes an edifice, a fabrication of the edifice of an identity and attempts at an epistemological grounding of the self. Because we have familial rules about having children, childbearing, marriage, the type of life that encompasses a proper married life—including of course the type of home one makes, which in turn lies at the narrative center of the book.
Aysegül Savaş:
The book is a lot about figuring out how to live, and how, if you're living in the country that you were born in, and if your partner is from the same country as you are, some of the ways in which you live are obvious, because you have certain rituals that you follow along with the rest of the country; you might celebrate Christmas, for example. And you have certain family rituals that you will follow: you'll see your parents on weekends, you'll visit grandparents on holidays, etc. But if you're living in a foreign place, and if you don't share a culture with your partner, then those rules are absolutely arbitrary. And so the book is really concerned with, then, how does one know they're arbitrary, and proceed to handle that.
And also, if you're at a certain place in your life, a certain sort of early adulthood, then you're more free; you don't have the rules of children, or old age, or health, any of those things tying you down. So you're free to choose whatever you'd like. But that freedom is also quite oppressive and can become a constraint. So the book tries to figure that out, but hopefully in a more joyful way, asking a question like: How do you make rituals for a life if you don't have the traditional rituals of culture? And then how can we treat those rituals—as random as they may seem, like a ritual of watching a detective show in the evening—with a certain amount of poetry or sense of sacredness?
D. W. White:
The recurring detective show that they watch was one of those nice little real-life touches. Your answer leads to some thoughts I had about structure. We can think about structure in life, as you say, regarding family rules. I'm wondering about the way you decided to structure the book, with these shorter vignettes, each having a title, some of which recur and some of which do not. How did those structural choices fit into these fundamental themes as you started to explore the book?
Aysegül Savaş:
The episodic form of the novel is a way to teach the reader what to expect. This isn't a book in major scales, we're not going to get an overarching plot. Instead, we're delivered scenes in small, small episodes. Were I to have written this book in traditional chapter form, for example, I think it would be misleading for the reader, because they'd have expectations about what was going to happen, in the plot, or looking for some greater sense of building-up in characters, than in fact happens. Of course there are things that build up—a sense of time, certainly—but I don't see it as the same sort of plot one might expect from a more traditional novel, a novel written in chapters that form a traditional story arc. So in one way, it's supposed to signal to the reader what they're reading.
On the other hand, I think the smallness of the episodes is also the smallness of the subject matter that I'm dealing with. Having morning coffee is a small matter, riding your bike through the city is a small matter, watching detective series, or reading a poem at night with your upstairs neighbor: these are small issues, and these are the small textures of a day. And I wanted that content to be mimetic of the form. This is something that all writers do. Once they realize the subject of their book, they say, "Well, how will the form take the shape of the subject?" Or sometimes it's the other way around, and you seem to be writing into this form, and asking what sort of story might arise from it. So I think the two really go hand in hand.
D. W. White:
That leads into my next question, about your process and the compositional history of the novel. Which one—form or subject—tends to come first for you?
Aysegül Savaş:
Well, the very first seed of the novel is a short story I wrote called "Future Selves." It's about a young couple searching for an apartment to buy. So on the one hand, you might say it's really the frame of this book, which it is. But on the other hand, to me, the novel has a very different composition, and as a result, a very different mood. The story is quite somber, and has a more sharply-defined storyline. I realized when I wrote the story that I loved this idea of an apartment hunt, and just how that structure opens so many doors to the future, and questions of how to live. So that's something I took from the story. And I wanted to explore it. And yet, that story was really a very melancholy piece. It's about a certain impossibility of achieving. Maybe there's a happy future there, but it's not now. The Anthropologists is concerned with a question of how does one live a happy life?
So, even though I took the form of the story, the mood of the novel is completely different from the story. And for a while, just a few months, I tried expanding the story in its own form—writing out chapters that were like short stories—and it didn't work, because I very quickly realized that what I wanted to investigate was the sort of joyful, everyday texture. And then I started breaking things down.
D. W. White:
Sticking for a moment with structure, I was intrigued by the first-person present tense sections. The reader comes to learn that they're transcripts from our protagonist, Asya's, interviews at the park with the subjects of her documentary film. I thought those sections were fascinating because Asya doesn't explain what they are; they're simply posited, instead, allowed to be there. They struck me as a fruitful way of changing speeds in narration. How did those first-person present tense sections come to be?
Aysegül Savaş:
Yes, that was the balance of the documentary, but it was, I think, one of the biggest challenges in writing this book. And I think different readers will have a different take. Some will think it doesn't work at all, some will want more. I wanted these snippets to connect the novel to Asya as a character: she's working on a documentary, and this seems important to the book, because she is approaching her own life project the way she's approaching her documentary, trying to answer the question of how people live. How should we live? So it's important this is her career, and the thing she's doing during the search for an apartment.
I thought it would be a little bit boring, too much "art is talking about art" sort of thing, if we didn't have direct encounters with the documentary, if we instead just had Asya talking about being an artist and what she encountered rather than seeing the thing itself. So I decided to not have any artistic discussion or any craft discussion at all about the documentary. I was just going to put the documentary scenes in there and then try to order them in some way that would provide, perhaps, an interesting contrast to the episodes that followed, or that came before. Showing different ways of living or different ways of being in the city.
It was so important for me to write a happy book. And this was one of my constraints. As I was doing it, I was thinking, "What am I doing? What is a happy book? Can you write a happy book that's literary?" And so the idea of a public park became quite important, philosophically, just because it is such a democratic space. And it's a place where you can be and do so many things that are otherwise not allowed in the public sphere, you can be yourself without having to spend money. You know, you can lie on a bench and sleep and people wouldn't say, "What are you doing?" So that sort of inhabiting, that freedom to inhabit a space in various ways, was important to me. And that's one of the questions here and now: How do we inhabit the city? And the park offers many uplifting examples of that, of just regular people.
D. W. White:
Can you expand a bit on the idea of writing a happy book that's still literary? How you saw that as a constraint and also how you went about navigating that constraint?
Aysegül Savaş:
I do call it a happy book, even though there are very sad elements. Asya and Manu are away from their families, seeing their parents age, her grandmother gets very sick. Their upstairs neighbor is aging, their best friend moves away. And I thought, "Even if you're writing a happy book, can it have any real weight?" Because yes, it does have to deal with the real textures of life. And no life is purely happy. So the question was how to write about those textures without overly dramatizing them; a lot of times, the way we think about plot is through tragedy, through some huge problem. And I thought, if I do that, if I create an entanglement through tragedy, or a misunderstanding of our argument, that's going to take away from the episodic form. And then the center of focus will really be this plot element, and the plot element has to be some sort of problem. And I guess part of the reason I wanted it to be a happy book is because I really wanted to write about two people who love one another without complication. And this is not something that I see very much (in fiction), even though it's such an ordinary everyday thing, people loving one another. And they live together for years and years, and they create their quirky little coupledom, and their families. And I thought that's what I would like to examine, without the contrivance of plot. At the same time, I wanted to add to it the daily melancholic textures of feeling alive.
And then the other problem of writing a happy book is that it has to be written in a very unhappy world, right? When you have so much political and environmental disaster—and this is something authors always have to come to terms with, no matter what they're writing—the question is "What's the use of writing when this is the state of the world?" And I think that it's an unanswerable question. If you've decided to be a writer, you sort of have to live with the choice you've made. And if you think it's morally unpardonable, then you should not be a writer, even if you're writing great political novels; they're not going to save the world. And so then the challenge with this happy book, writing about these two people who love one another, was to say: "Okay, let me try to see that clearly, let me honor their daily lives, let me not write about it in abstraction, but in as much grounded detail as I can."
D. W. White:
I love that answer, about the sort of radially extant choice to be an author. And that dovetails into another aspect of that book that struck me, one having to do with sense of place. As you mentioned, the public parks where Asya is filming her documentary, some of which we see in those first-person present tense sections, are places that at least enjoy a somewhat relaxed orientation towards societal rules. I was interested in the choice to keep the city in which Asya and Manu live unnamed. It does remind me a fair bit of Paris, which is surely informed by my own experiences and knowing you live here, as it's certainly not an exact fit. It seemed that this namelessness informed some of the themes of freedom, while at the same time not allowing the use of familiar shorthands for the reader in describing locations around the city. And it works out some of the questions around communal space and rule-following, alienation and isolation, that lay at the heart of the novel.
Aysegül Savaş:
White on White also takes place in an unnamed city, but there I had a very freeing feeling of being able to invent. I wanted to write a ghost story in White on White, something that felt like a ghost story and is in a Gothic city and I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be amazing to use details of many Gothic cities?" And by being nameless, no one can question me, asking if Northern Italian sculpture really has this certain feature, etc. I can make it up and people could say, "Is it Italy? Is it France? Is it Germany?" But for The Anthropologists, I thought that the anthropological elements, and the anthropological investigations, somehow necessitated that the city be unnamed. Because if it was, you know, a Turk living in Paris, the anthropology and the sociology of Turks in Paris is something very, very specific. And the immigration of Turks is different from the 1980s than it is today. And I thought that what I'm more interested in—more than a Turk living in Paris—is a young person in a country that is not their native country, which is the experience of so many young people, and more and more so, as the world changes.
And the anthropological element is interesting, because it's not as interested in the culture you've left behind. I'm more interested in the new culture that you're going to create. I was drawn to that sense of blankness, and then using anthropology as a lens to examine these lives, as a practice that is so place-focused, so specific in the rules and societal networks that it examines. What if it's worth examining this couple, in their funny home? Right? What sort of ritual is that? How is it that anthropology says that humans are different from other animals? Because they can create culture? What would these people be like without set cultural norms? What would their culture be? And what would the anthropologist have to say about them? So it was more interesting for me to not tie them down to their home cultures and to the culture of the city that they were living in, but to just have them as young people. Obviously the book is inspired by Paris, because that's the city in which I've mostly been a stranger. But I think there are elements of other cities as well; there aren't very many places to hang out in, in Paris. That's a more southern European element. And you know, Parisian plazas are sort of cordoned off. Very pretty, but not really open to just hanging out.
D. W. White:
Something that really struck me about the book was the unification of the narrative and the narration, especially the choice to have Asya working as a documentary filmmaker. I wrote in my review of The Anthropologists about how this idea of exploring characters who are artists seems to be an interesting thing happening right now in contemporary literature, and here I think there's a clear symbiotic connection between what the book is interested in—thematically, culturally, stylistically—and what happens in it, i.e., the detailing of Asya's project happening in, or as, the plot. There's a greater ontological urgency in the claims the novel is making that is achieved through this assertion that Asya, and her specific type of art, can thrive at the center of a narrative, because it's the same type of art the novel itself is looking to make. The "craft" elements, for lack of a better word, show up again in the things that happen in the story. So I was wondering if you could speak a little more about how that came about, and how that you felt that mapped onto the book's overall goals.
Aysegül Savaş:
There are two elements to it. One is that, obviously, I myself am very interested in art. And, therefore, I enjoy writing about and thinking about artists. But then I want to also make it enjoyable for the reader. And as I want there to be that anthropological element to the book, the present tense scenes are sort of our field notes of how the natives of the city live.
At the same time, there's a more profound question here about why it is that so many novels these days are writers writing about artists. And I think it's because right now we are cautious about writing about ways of living that aren't similar to our own. And I think there are a lot of artists, a lot of writers, who can continue writing, teaching in MFA programs, and staying in an artistic realm. And making their livelihood through it. So we're surrounded by lots of people who are practicing art. And that's what we end up writing about. Is that a great thing for literature? I actually have no idea. I don't think it's a bad or a good thing. I just do think that it's something that is a marker of our times. Both a caution about the types of stories we tell, and also a way we think differently than writers of previous generations. The way in which these MFA programs offer writers a way to live within these artistic bubbles.
D. W. White:
I'd like to ask about the journey of the book and how you locate it in the context of your career, as your third novel. How do you view your own projects through the prism of your literary ancestry, developing both from your earlier work and that of writers you admire and trace as influences?
Aysegül Savaş:
I don't think I have sort of a grand view of my work, although now that I'm working on a fourth novel, I am suddenly seeing patterns emerge. It's taken me all this time to suddenly see, "Oh, this is what I keep writing about." And it's something so simple. I write about people who are estranged from their surroundings, in different ways, of course. But at the same time, I feel like each project exhausts one craft element for me. And then the only thing I know in starting the next project is to do anything but that one thing—that I sort of killed it off in writing the last book, or that I'm so tired by it. So I guess possibly what happened with The Anthropologists is that when I finished White on White, I said, "I'm not going to write about people telling stories. I am done with the long monologue or the recounting of self and these long stories from the past that shed light on a moment in the present, or how one has turned out in the present."
And so, it's very short and snappy dialogue in The Anthropologists, and there are no characters revealing themselves through these long, long stretches of story as I had in White on White. And I think that was the one thing I knew, going into this novel. And I guess because of the somber, eerie mood of White on White, I thought, "You know, how fun would it be to write a joyful book?" I think more than anything I start with atmosphere. And I thought, "How fun would it be if I started with atmosphere? What if the atmosphere was a bit like a Tove Jansson novel, or like a nouvelle vague film?" And probably with The Anthropologists, what I have finally exhausted, at least for some time, is the episodic form, because my first three novels now have been episodic. And The Anthropologists is an extreme version: very, very short, each with a title, and the episodes repeat, there really is a lot less chronology in this book than in the first two, except for this loose apartment search. I think I finally exorcised the episodic form and, starting with the next book, I want to write a chronological book with long chapters. So I think this is the progress I see, that I seem to write out certain craft elements, or forms, in writing, and then I say, "I'm done with that." But the themes themselves, or the feelings themselves, have really remained the same.
FICTION
The Anthropologists
By Aysegül Savaş
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published July 9, 2024
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