I recently picked up The Anthropologists by Ayșegül Savaş, and I loved every minute of reading it. This slim novel is the story of a young couple, Asya and Manu, trying to find home in an unnamed city (possibly in the West). Set in the post-college period with a distinctive ‘we didn’t grow up but now we are adults’ undertone, this book allows us to peek into the uneventful lives of the young couple.
Asya is a documentary film maker who interviews people at a park and her husband Manu works at a non-profit organization. We follow her and Manu as they live their lives, hang out with their small circle of friends, find rituals of their own, keep connections from the homeland alive, and realize one day that they are too different from the family they love.
Much is untold in this book. We do not know the homes Asya and Manu left, they remain unnamed. We wonder about their differences as a couple when they build a life together. As I read this book, I found traces of myself and the people I know all over. It made me nostalgic of the times gone by. It made me sad at relationships lost. It made me stand back in awe of the many things that have happened in my life until now and the people who have crossed my paths.
Savaş conveys the story in simple words in a non-dramatic fashion. Asya shouts at her mother on a video call which was her misplaced anger because her mother is showing signs of aging in a distant land while she is away in another country. She wonders whether news about her elderly neighbor should be conveyed to her old grandmother back home whom she hasn’t seen in person in a long time. She wonders how her friend circles could overlap, and if they would become smaller.
But this isn’t a sad novel. It isn’t a lament to things lost. Rather it reminds us that genuine love and warmth can exist in a city that is not home, because of which you dream that it could be your home one day. “There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths,” Asya narrates in the beginning of the novel. Several passages that follow are heart touching—when one feels unheard, when one does not understand why the people you love do not understand them, when siblings feel like strangers one day, when one questions the new relationships forged in a new city but know that these bonds also give you the fuel to march towards another day. Asya and Manu love their ritual of meeting their elderly neighbor over food every week. But the neighbor’s loss of memory, because of which she doesn’t recognize them one day, could be symbolic of the disjoint with their own family back home. The reader knows that a new normal would take its place, just like how we tirelessly bridge relationships with those who are geographically distant from us. After every bad day, new one would take its place.
Asya and Manu could be in their twenties, but this book is a perfect millennial novel, those fleeting years caught between growing up and grown up (do we ever?), the slowness, the leisurely do-nothing days of youth, the rot of simply being—beautiful! Perhaps this is the millennial’s answer to the domestic slow novels like Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield or Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (both of which I love). “Daily life,” Asya admits, “was a difficult story to tell.”
“She didn’t know how to point out the insincerity to her daughter, who was part of a generation of educated women that paid rapt attention to the things that gave them pleasure and turned them into rituals for display,” writes Savaş about the contrast of insincere captions about mother-daughter relationships on Instagram to the genuineness in the food preparation. When she writes, “I don’t think you should try and teach anyone how to talk about their family…It’s arrogant,” you feel a jolt through the page. When Asya’s grandmother says “We named you after a whole continent and you’re filming a park,” you feel the weight of her expectations and disappointment.
The Anthropologists is a must-read novel for those who have called different countries their home. It is told in vignettes—almost like a diary of personal moments told in a page or two—plotless, full of beautiful snapshots of simply existing.
If you have still searching for your truest self, wondering where you belong, living with an ache that might last you this lifetime because nowhere is the ‘right’ place, this book is for you. “Where do I feel most like myself? I don’t know how to answer that question. I guess I’m still looking,”—writes Savaş. Perhaps you feel the same way too.
If you've found home in different countries, if you keep searching for your truest self, read The Anthropologists by Ayșegül Savaş Share on XSubscribe
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Excellent review! I now definitely want to read this!
I hope you enjoy,
I left a comment on social media–couldn’t comment here while on my phone for some reason. I just wanted to say I went to the library website and was able to download this book and read feverishly for my free hour. Wow! Thank you for this reommendation!
All good. I can see the comment here too. I hope you enjoy reading the rest of the book. I am glad you were able to get your hands on a copy quickly. Libraries for the win!