Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, is 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.
Through afternoon walks, late-night conversations, and a series of apartment tours, The Anthropologists follows Asya and her husband Manu as they embark on the age-old quest of finding a home in a foreign place, but Savaş renders this search for belonging as something new and profound with every turn. By day, Asya works as a documentary filmmaker; by night, as an amateur anthropologist searching for the meaning of a good life among her friends and family. Changing moods, the shifting light in a room, the things we tell our grandmothers over the phone, and the things we leave out—all these become significant through Asya’s eyes. Throughout the novel, Savaş writes powerfully about how the small moments, fluctuations, rituals and routines we carry end up defining the size of our worlds, as the details become what we remember most about the ones who were in it with us.
“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.” Taking place across neighborhood cafés and wine bars, dinner parties and lazy Sunday brunch—where conversations between friends and family as well as “foreigners” and “city natives” extend long into the night—The Anthropologists unveils the inner workings of our fragmented days through short chapters titled by the different components of anthropological fieldwork. The novel also tells a beautiful love story about living in a city far from home and how another person might just become one’s native country. Ultimately, Savaş reveals what it means to build a good life while exploring all the different shapes this may come in.
From her home in Paris, Savaş spoke over Zoom with me about little joys, parks, anchors, and the enchanting rituals of our lives.
Kyla Walker: To begin, what inspired you to pursue this novel? Your beautiful short story, ”Future Selves” (published in March of 2021) carries similar themes and ideas with a couple apartment-hunting in a city and country where neither of them are from amidst searching for permanence, belonging, and a place to call home. But what inspired you to expand on this story and why through the characters of Asya and Manu?
Ayşegül Savaş: Well, I really enjoyed writing that short story just because I thought I had tapped into a feeling of the unknown future. And I thought, I have more of this feeling to explore. But at the same time, the short story has quite a solemn tone. Also, I wanted to write a happy book. This was really one of the things I had in mind when I started writing my third novel. How do I write a happy book? How do I intimate some sort of joy of daily life into its structure? So the solemn tone of “Future Selves” really changed. But the structure of looking for a home and how that very tangible search can become philosophical was my guide throughout. And I guess the other inspiration was the certain phase of life that was ending for me and this phase of life when one is both young and an adult. I wanted to capture it in some way—the sense of being lost, the sense of being responsible and irresponsible, being both young and adult.
KW: I think that comes through so much. There is lots of joy in the novel, through the conversations and the things Asya notices about the world. And that’s really interesting—being in that ambivalent transition phase. Did you feel like that was a major theme as well—this concept of being in between places, ages, countries and cultures? Are all these characters on the cusp of something?
I wanted to capture it in some way—the sense of being lost, the sense of being responsible and irresponsible, being both young and adult.
AS: Yes. It really is a book about transition and this idea of cultural transition came a little bit later, even though it’s so central to the novel. It was much more for me about the transition into an unknown adulthood and also the transition from being students to being grown-ups. And when I started exploring that transition, I really understood that I couldn’t write about it without also writing about a certain cultural transition, which is to say, that time in your life where you really have to decide what culture you belong to and how you’re going to root yourself because you can’t be in many places for the rest of your life. You can’t be unrooted for the rest of your life. Then I started the anthropological fieldwork for this novel in which I’d go around asking our friends, our international friends, what their rituals were. Something very interesting was that lots and lots of people—because many of my friends are secular and don’t necessarily have traditional rituals that ground them in life—would say, “Oh, well, we don’t really have rituals because we live far from our homes and we don’t practice religion.” And then I’d say, “Yes, but how about things that you repeat?” And they’d say, “Well, you know what? Friday night is pizza night, or I watch this show with this person.” A lot of them said, for example, morning coffee was a ritual. So I wanted to encapsulate that secular enchantment into the novel as well.
KW: That’s beautiful. So much of this novel is about the tangential characters, the people who come in and out of Asya’s daily life… It almost feels like Asya is the readers’ lens onto this landscape of her loved ones. Right? And since she is a documentary filmmaker in the book, do you think Asya’s ever able to fully separate her fieldwork, her professional life, from her personal life? Or do you think she’s always a bit of a documentarian, trying to capture and savor all these moments with her friends and family?
AS: It’s very possible that she became a documentarian because she does want to understand how people live, because she wants to understand for herself how one is supposed to make a life. And that’s also why I think she gravitates from these larger, more important documentaries about issues of social justice to this one documentary in the novel which is about the park in the city and how people live. I think this isn’t just her professional training—this is her personal curiosity because she herself is so many things that she doesn’t know what she is and she doesn’t know which of the many aspects of her identity she should pursue in making her life. So with the many secondary characters in the book, they are minor but they also offer different versions of a traditional way to live and a way to live with poetry, a way to live irresponsibly, a way to live like you’re still a student. And these are all ways of living I think that intrigue her.
KW: Yes, that brings me back to the title as well, The Anthropologists. The title is plural—not referencing a singular anthropologist such as Asya. So is the title perhaps suggesting that everybody is an anthropologist in their own right?
You can’t be unrooted for the rest of your life.
AS: It is. It’s actually quite funny because my husband suggested the first title for this novel when he read the first draft. He said, “I think it should be called Anthropology.” Until then, the novel was called Future Selves. And when he said Anthropology, it gave me a way to think about the book structurally. And it also gave me permission to write these very small chapters and to give them titles the way one might title different components of fieldwork. So this is how the sections were formed from kinship structures and gift exchange and rituals. Then my agent said, “Well, you know, this sounds a little bit like a textbook, and we might have a hard time distinguishing Anthropology the novel from Anthropology 101 that might be on sale at a bookshop.” So she suggested The Anthropologists. But also that suggestion, I think, brought the book alive just because it’s both about how to live and the structures of of living a life and of composing a life, but it’s also about how to live in a couple. Manu and Asya are the anthropologists here, and so much of the book is about their kinship structures. But at the end of the day, it’s primarily about how to live a life with the person one loves.
KW: In your previous novel, White on White, there similarly wasn’t too much information about where the narrator was from. Actually, there wasn’t any information in White on White about where the narrator was from, or even their name or gender. But in this one we get a little bit more, though still very hazy vague backgrounds. What was the intention behind this in The Anthropologists? Have you found yourself just more interested in other parts of characters’ identities than their pasts?
AS: Yes. I think it’s interesting to me too that both of these books are set in unnamed locations. In White on White, the characters don’t have names or very distinct pasts, but for different reasons. I think in White on White, I was very interested in creating a certain atmosphere and having the liberty to create a Gothic atmosphere. And I was also interested in what it means to be stripped naked of identity markers. Whereas in The Anthropologists, I’m interested in almost the exact opposite. What does it mean to create an identity that is made up of many particular various inspirations, and not necessarily to strip oneself of identity, but to assemble an identity? And so, I didn’t want it to be a specific immigrant experience of a Turk living in France, for example, which really is a niche sort of immigrant novel. I wanted it to be about a more universal sense of being young and making a life and trying to find a home away from home.
KW: Wonderful, yes. Although the name Asya, it is Turkish, right? And her grandmother says that great line: “We named you after a continent and you’re filming a park.” I was thinking about the park a lot, and how in your novel Walking on the Ceiling, you mention the Gezi Park protests, and parks seem to have a very strong significance in your previous work. In this book, Asya captures mundane moments, but they seem to be significant markers for how to make a life and how the people around her are making a life. So I was curious about how this ties into the Gezi Park protests and how even something as calm and beautiful as a day at the park could have political implications in some way. Was that something you were thinking about while writing Asya’s character?
What does it mean to create an identity that is made up of many particular various inspirations?
AS: I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought about the Gezi Park protests actually. But you’re right. I think only because I myself am very drawn to parks. They are probably one of the first places I’ll visit in a new city. I’ll ask: What’s the biggest park? Where do people hang out to have a piece of nature? And parks are very political, even though they seem so innocent in the sense that they are democratic. They’re free, natural spaces where you can exist in the public sphere without having to pay for it and where everyone is equal. That’s why Gezi was such an important moment in its protests for retaining this piece of nature in the middle of the city, in a city that was so hierarchical and that was so based on spending. Where the public sphere was becoming less and less accessible to the people who live in the city. And that’s why I think Asya also is drawn to the park because it’s a place where many different types of people can coexist.
KW: That’s so true… My next question refers to a lovely essay that you wrote about the Blue Voyage and your family trips to Bodrum. There’s a line in it that I think relates to this book as well. You wrote: “Lévi-Strauss writes that anthropologists have been preoccupied with determining the ‘original’ version of a myth, of finding the authentic one among all its variations. But all versions of a myth are true, he continues, insofar as they grapple with the same contradictions in each re-telling.” Did this idea of mythmaking or a search for origins play a role in The Anthropologists?
AS: Yes, yes. I think part of that quote from Lévi-Strauss is also, in my mind, related to storytelling and how we form our merits, our identities, through the stories that we tell. And in The Anthropologists, it is about mythmaking. How does one create myths when there are no original myths to set off from? How can Manu and Asya create their own foundational myths without having anything to start from? So they’re really the creators, and that’s at once a great liberty but also a huge restriction or a huge responsibility because there’s so many options available to them.
KW: Definitely. I think that comes through too with apartment hunting, right? They get to peek into all these lives that they could live and follow… I thought that was so beautiful.
AS: And they have to impose a certain foundational myth on the apartment that they’re choosing, right? Because it’s what sort of people are we? What is the foundational myth with which we have set off that our identity and therefore our home will represent or we’ll mimic? And since they’re still searching for their foundational myth, any apartment could be a choice just because they could be anyone with the narratives that they choose about themselves.
KW: In a recent interview, you asked the Turkish artist and photographer Nil Yalter: “When you’re from everywhere and nowhere, an eternal migrant, what anchors you? Where or what makes you feel like less of a stranger?” I love that question and would like to ask a similar one geared towards your characters. What constitutes the foundation of Asya, Manu, and Ravi’s lives?
They could be anyone with the narratives that they choose about themselves.
AS: I think Asya and Manu would say one another. You know, Asya would say Manu is the thing that anchors her. And I feel like Manu would say the same. However, there are moments where they hope that they could say, well, our little trio with Ravi. And of course, that’s a shaky trio because by the end of the novel Ravi is going to try to find a life of his own. And it seems very unfair to Asya. She’s thinking: Well, why does he have to leave? We have such a great setup. And it’s a little bit selfish of them to think that—to think that Ravi would only belong to their small structure and not make one of his own. And I guess, for Ravi… I don’t know what Ravi would say. In some sense, I think he’s still searching. He, perhaps at the end of the novel, goes off to see whether this new configuration might give him more of the sense of anchor in life.
KW: Yeah, definitely. Asya and Manu also seem to have this childlike optimism and almost whimsical perception of being new to a country or a city where they’re not from. Obviously there is a lot of hardship in this, but there is also this excitement and wonder they seem to carry throughout. How do they find beauty in being far from home?
AS: I think this is sort of a sentiment that was prevalent in the ’90s—that it was a great thing to travel and to see many countries and to live in a country that isn’t your own. And this was encouraged. It was “the good thing to do” to be a world citizen. Manu and Asya have really had this ethos at the beginning of the novel, and also in their youth, that you can make a life anywhere and you can be a citizen of the world. And I think that thought gets questioned or that ideal gets questioned throughout the novel, like, can you really do that? And what are you sacrificing when you’re a stranger and living in different places all the time?
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