The Anthropologists

Starred review from May 13, 2024
In the exceptional latest from Savaş (White on White), an idealistic young couple flounders in their half-hearted effort to put down roots in an unnamed city far from their respective homelands. Asya, who makes “joyful and naïve” documentaries about everyday life, met fellow international student Manu in college. Since graduation, they’ve been renting a small, dark apartment in the city, and now decide they’re ready to buy their own place. They visit a range of listings, including a converted factory, a house in the suburbs, and an apartment off of an alley, the last of which they conclude is perfect except for the layout, which feels wrong in a way they can’t articulate. Though they want to step further into adulthood, they also want to preserve their youth, and they chafe at the willful conformity of their peers. Their friend Ravi, who patches together a living with tutoring gigs and collects old photographs, is a kindred spirit. So is their elderly neighbor, Tereza, with whom they read poetry. Savaş captures the singularity of the couple’s logic in lucid prose, and the real estate search gives shape to the spare and subtle narrative, as the couple’s indecisiveness and their affection for Ravi and Tereza keep readers guessing as to what they’ll do. It’s a masterpiece. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
A young documentary filmmaker considers the ways she could live in the future. Savaş' unnamed narrator relates the quotidian circumstances of life with her husband, Manu, a nonprofit worker. Both are �migr�s from different unnamed countries who met at an unnamed college in an unnamed country and moved to an unnamed city to begin their adult lives. Far from being remote and soulless, Savaş' compact novel conveys warmth and human detail in exploring the universal question confronting all (named and unnamed) people: how to live or "be" in the world. Relating the details of the couple's inside jokes and rituals--which bond them together in a country where they are not among the "natives"-- Savaş sympathetically illustrates the power of the everyday moments of joy and comfort found in a cup of coffee, a snack, or jokes with a friend. Once the couple begins searching for an apartment to purchase in an effort to create a more "sturdy" life for themselves, they are treated to the interior workings of the households they visit on their hunt. The narrator's work in progress, a documentary about a city park and its denizens, provides more opportunities to glimpse other ways to live and behave. The lives of the narrator's and Manu's families continue to evolve as well, with all of the attendant heartaches of illness, aging, and misfortune communicated, however awkwardly, from afar. Friends and neighbors experience their life crises during the brief interval illuminated beautifully by Savaş, creating further scenarios for her questioning narrator to investigate, as if documenting the social practices of an unfamiliar civilization. There are no explosions or battle scenes in this subtle novel, just an appreciation of the value and marvels of living a life that is your own. Perfectly perceptive.

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July 1, 2024
The quirkily charming latest novel from Savas (White on White, 2021) follows a young married couple, expatriates from two different countries. Living in an unnamed city, presumably in western Europe, they attempt to ground themselves more deeply in adulthood and find a new apartment to share. Asya, who narrates the novel, has received a grant to make a documentary film following the various people who frequent a local park--despite her grandmother's advice: "Forget about daily life . . . No one cares about that." Asya's husband, Manu, has a more conventional job at a nonprofit. When not apartment shopping, they go out for drinks with friends, fret about the mental health of an elderly neighbor, deal with visits from their interfering parents, and contemplate, from a vague distance, the possibility of parenthood. Savas delicately balances humor with pathos, supplying the droll details that make these ordinary lives shimmer as Asya and Manu gradually but inexorably change over the course of time.

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