Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel is an erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love. It opens with a moment of panic, when a married couple decide to start house-hunting. At this point, Asya and Manu have been living together in a foreign, unnamed city in a foreign, unnamed country for several years.
We’re told by Asya, a documentary film-maker, that they first met at university, and back then were only “playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them”. On weekends, they would leave the university campus to spend the day in town, among adults whose lives seemed at once real and unreal to them: “real, because that was how we imagined actual life in the abstract; unreal, because it did not seem we would ever be like them”. But now Asya worries that it’s time “ , as some people called it”.
Estrangement – from the city, from society, from the self – lies at the heart of Savaş’s work. Asya and Manu are not like their parents, who live in faraway countries and send dispatches, good and bad. They have a small social circle, but more often than not, it’s just Asya, Manu and their close friend Ravi who spend the days of their lives together – drinking, talking, dreaming.
They have few rituals, “certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths”. How, then, does one set down roots, or paint a portrait of a life not blurring at the edges? The apartment viewin.