Everyday Magic: Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists
- By Maya Gulieva
A Review of Ayşegül Savaş's The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024)
“The green jacket, the ceremonial stones, breakfast with Manu, the Dame on the terrace, and the shapes of poems,” goes Ayşegül Savaş’ magpie-like narrator Asya as she meticulously collects objects and moments with her partner Manu to build their nest, two ex-pats in an unnamed foreign city. In this all-too-relatable search, the very absence of the city’s name throws everything into question: the art of home-making, the mystery of marriage and the complexity of belonging. Feeling at once rootless and filled with promise, the couple ventures to put down the rules of how to live meaningfully, one brick at a time.
A freelance documentarian, Asya isn’t drawn to the grandiose or, on the surface of it, plot-worthy. Instead she wants to film the slow and leisurely rot of the city. She goes to the park daily and studies the people there with the rigor of an anthropologist observing local customs. She composes her footage in the style of Agnes Varda’s Daguerréotypes (1975) that turns the camera on shopkeepers, bakers, tailors, butchers, perfumers and neighbors on Rue Daguerre in Paris.
“Everyone, it seemed to me, had something truly weird about them, something unique and bizarre. This uniqueness was apparent in everyday acts, in the banal rather the extraordinary: the way they picked clothes for the day, the things they ate, how they spent a free hour.”
Why do you come to the park? Do you come every day? Do you like to be alone. Do you go through the middle, or around the perimeter? she might ask her interviewees. Her inner anthropologist is searching, restless, yearning for “a specific existence”, to truly know and to be known. But to their acquaintances like Sharon, who only gathers “foreigners” into her fold, Asya and Manu are “nothing more than our countries of origin, our accents, our work”—a generic list of traits that flattens the couple into a depthless document. Like her protagonist, Savaş not only abandons the forced drama that so often comes with the novel, but elevates this fascination with the quotidian to a thesis. Her dedication to the “infra-ordinary” has evocations of Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and of writer and teacher George Perec who, in Attention to What? (1973), urges us to found our own anthropology by questioning “our teaspoons”. For Asya, too, this examination requires urgency. It’s as if by studying those around her she might unlock her own belonging to the city where she and Manu are neither foreigners nor “true natives.”
“We named you after a whole continent and you are filming a park,” says Asya’s grandmother over FaceTime, puzzled by this choice of subject. The misunderstanding, to me, signals beyond the limitations of verbally articulating your quirky passions to granny. Through the personal, Savaş nudges at a political question: who gets to study the quotidian? To whom does the everyday constitute a reasonable subject? In The Anthropologists, this thesis is perfectly captured in the scuffs of the couple’s second-hand chest of drawers. To Asya and Manu, the furniture piece represents a romantic promise of a rustic lifestyle, whereas to Manu’s parents it looks like hardship they had “experienced firsthand.” Just as the distance from migration trauma gives the diaspora a vantage point to look back at their far-away origins with wonder, the privileges of a relatively unencumbered life abroad, where currencies aren’t “always depreciating” like it does in the couples’ countries of origin, preserves time and room to make art out of daily life, not just survive it.
During these long-distance conversations, the women mostly exchange details of what they ate for breakfast, seldom venturing into anything more substantial, as if preserving it for the moment when they might meet again in person. Trapped in perpetual longing, this moment is a moving target. While the couple plants firmer roots abroad, the people Asya loves back home are drifting further away—a trade-off to which most aspiring migrants can relate. Asya, too, has changed. There is a moment when, after it is clear that Asya’s grandmother’s declining health might be a burden to her mother, Asya advises her to consider a cultural taboo: a retirement home. Her mother is baffled. Instantly, the daughter feels the sting of her own strangeness. “I’d adapted too quickly that autonomy should come above all else,” she says of her unwitting assimilation into Western values. “I thought of this as a moral value, an unquestionably desirable state.” The deepest pitfall of separation isn’t geographical distance, The Anthropologists shows us, but the ever-expanding gap of cultural and moral norms between the old and the new.
So, if nothing is permanent, then what’s important? the novel seems to ask. What truly endures?
The answer glistens like a stained-glass window welded from the spare fragments of prose. Grouped under recurring titles such as “In the Park”, “Native Tongue” and “Principles of Kinship”, the structure of The Anthropologists is reminiscent of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Books. Permeated with a philosophy of the quotidian, this slim volume pierces not with the what, but the how of every moment. Thus, the true merit lies with how Savaş crafts her prose. Just in Asya’s grandmother’s manicured hands “making spirals as she spoke”, in the way they “dramatised her bitterness and joy”, we can observe a vanished beauty of what’s been left on the page—just one poignant stroke of many that make up the book’s astonishing collective portrait of ageing women.
We can see this too in the familiar ritual of the pot luck in all its wonder and strangeness through the eyes of three characters in attendence. Through the caustic and dispossessed Lena, a woman native to the city yet always talking of how she wishes she could move away, Savaş is able to imbue the scene of a growing mound of food with the perishing decadence of a vanitas painting, which Lena calls “a still life of oysters and cake”. Meanwhile, Ravi, the couple’s closest friend, would take a dingy bar filled with regulars over glitz any day. Reserved and a little stubborn, he isn’t as invested in expanding their friendship circle, and his opinions on class dismiss the party altogether as a “show of wealth and taste”. Yet for Asya, who had come to the party with purpose—to audition people into her tribe of chosen family—pot luck takes on a quality of an initiation ceremony. “Homo sapiens gathered for ritual”, she says after she places her hopeful offering.
In Savaş’s methodical hands, The Anthropologists is a refracting object. A looking glass. Look through it once and every party, every shared pot of coffee will forever feel like magic.
MAYA GULIEVA is a writer of fiction and essays with a background in art and design. Born in Moscow to a family of refugees from the Kavkaz and Siberian Altai, and raised in West Country England, she now lives between Western Massachusetts and New York City. She uses the Gothic genre to write about haunting pasts, rootlessness, longing, sisterhood, bisexualism, the thorny necessity for making art and how we are shaped by the places we live in. Currently an MFA candidate in prose at UMass Amherst, she is at work on her first novel.
