Asya, the narrator of the novel The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, and Asya's husband Manu, are from two different countries and live in a third country:
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 don't intend to write a full review of this endearing novel; others have done a good job...
Sana Goyal in The Guardian: "The novel exists in the liminalities, distances and tensions between two states or stages of life, and traces the discrepancies between the kinds of adults the characters are and the kinds of adults they were expected to be."
Kayla D. Walker in Electric Lit (including a conversation with the author): "... a breathtaking excavation of the wonders and intricacies involved in making a modern life in a new city, of feeling both young and adult, and of growing up while settling down."
... I just wanted to give you some idea of why I loved this quiet novel so much. Its structure is a series of Asya's observations on their life together, with insertions from the interviews she conducts in a city park as she films a documentary about the life of that park. The task the young couple have set for themselves is to find a new, more "sturdy" place to live in that unnamed city, something better than the small, dark apartment they had found "in an unremarkable part of town" which they'd chosen "without much thought. Back then, we were only playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them."
In the meantime, daily life goes on:
Manu left home early to go to work at the nonprofit organization on the other side of the city. While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across from each other, face-to-face. There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths. So these small things mattered. I would make sure to sit with him at the table.
Before he left, we kissed in the hallway.
Okay, Manu said, back in my shoes.
Another ritual: their periodic online conversations with family members in their respective homelands, revealing the anxieties of parents and grandparents, and their variable ability to understand what their kids are doing. And part of the progression of the book is their establishment of new, lightweight but significant, rituals of their own.
Most of their acquaintances are also expats, who vary in their comfort with the city that unites them and the culture they may or may not be adapting to. When do friends really say what they're anxious about? How do you know when someone is avoiding you ... or are you misinterpreting their signals?
The book is full of tiny but telling details—what objects they choose, for example, to decorate their apartment, and the hints of long-term intimacy in their nicknames for themselves as a couple, and their ritual catch-phrases. Some reviewers mentioned that they inhaled this novel in one or two sittings, but I found myself needing to take frequent breaks to savor and ponder what I'd just read.
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Some parts of The Anthropologists also reminded me of my years in "exile" from the USA—that is, my university years in Ottawa, Ontario, during the war in Viet Nam.
The other comparison that the humane, steady, affectionate voice of Ayşegül Savaş brought to my mind was Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson. There are major differences, of course; for example, Paterson doesn't have an explicit "foreigner" context, although it's hard to forget in today's world that Golshifteh Farahani, who plays Paterson's wife Laura, is from Iran. But there are parallels, too, in the quiet portrayal of long-term intimacy and the little rituals that accompany it, the yearning to create art (Laura is a designer always seeking new media, and wants to become a country music star; husband Paterson, a bus driver, observes his passengers and writes poetry on his breaks). In both the novel and the movie, conflicts do arise, and are mostly resolved, but kindness rules.
Laura: I was dreaming that we were in ancient Persia. And... you were riding on an elephant. A big, silver elephant.
Paterson: A silver elephant?
Laura: Yeah. You looked so beautiful.
Paterson: Do they have elephants in ancient Persia?
Laura: [laughs] I don't think so. Not silver ones, anyway.
[Source.]
From The Anthropologists' author Ayşegül Savaş on creating her story's clock.
Friends Committee on National Legislation advocates restoring USA humanitarian funding for Gaza.
Conversation, conversion, and "faithful betrayal"—part of what it has meant to Wess Daniels to find and be found by God.
Epistle from the Young Adult Friends' gathering at Jordans meetinghouse and a related article by Matt Rosen.
Sierra-Cascades Friends make a visit to Kake, Alaska. Reflections from Joel Jackson, tribal council president, and Juulie Downs of Camas Friends Church.
More Canadian content: Blues guitarist Sue Foley, "Come to Me."
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