A Conversation with Ayşegül Savaş
“Being a foreigner is a good education in viewing one’s life at a distance.”
Ayşegül Savaş is chic and warm, with a kind smile and a twinkle in her eye. This shouldn’t have surprised me, since these are the qualities of her delightful narrator; reading The Anthropologists felt like befriending Asya, her dry but open sensibility one I covet for myself. Indeed, Savaş shared, not only is the novel loosely inspired by her life, it also draws conceptually from her studies in anthropology, her quick, vignette-like chapters evoking “field notes” on everyday life. But Asya’s field notes are more than just good observations; they’re incisive reflections on the quotidian details that make us feel like we belong.
I’d guessed right about a few things while reading The Anthropologists: first, that it was an quasi autofictional project (I knew Savaş herself lived in Paris, so that helped). I’d also been right to think of it as a pandemic novel. Savaş shared that she began writing the piece at the start of the pandemic in part because she wanted to capture the “feeling of daily life.” (See my piece at Lit Hub on pandemic storytelling!)
The third way I was right delighted me most of all: that the novel was written with an anticapitalist spirit. I was tickled when Savaş lamented the ways “one’s identity is legitimized through production.” The entire crowd at Porter Square Books giggled when Savaş put air-quotes around the phrase “responsible adults.” I’d been right that her characters’ love of rotting—of letting something other than productivity shape their days—had political meaning, even though Asya, Manu, and their best friend Ravi, all foreigners, don’t discuss any specific political stance in the story.
When you’re a young person, Savaş told us, “your categories of belonging are still in flux.” Asya, Manu, and Ravi, her characters, are “foreigners in a universal sense,” in that their ability to “create a culture from scratch” comes from that state of flux, that need to find or build the categories of belonging that will make adult life feel, as Asya puts it, “sturdy.”
Will finding the perfect apartment do the trick? Or will it take the right native friends, neighbors, local bars? How does a foreigner come to belong? Asya and Manu certainly find belonging with each other; the book opens with a strong “we,” but when asked if The Anthropologists could be considered a romance novel, Savas said no: she didn’t want a romance plot to be the focus of this story. “Plot is a very artificial narrative construct,” she added, citing Tove Janssen as a “patron saint” of the novel whose books helped her to “resist plot” while writing.
What could be more of a literary response to the pandemic than to resist plot? The year of Asya’s life depicted in the novel does involve some plotting, some producing: maintaining social connections, finding routines, collecting footage for a film. But for the most part, this is a book whose plot is the same as everyone’s plot: to get from one day to the next, often with a pit stop at the park or the café as a place to reflect on the bustling world, the world in which you inevitably belong.
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After meeting Savas in Boston, I had the distinct pleasure of corresponding with her about the novel. We discussed the perils of writing a city that’s non-specific yet vivid; the unique perspective of the foreigner; and her favorite Paris park.
Staff Picks: Sometimes it seems like Asya and Manu are homesick; other times, not at all. Is this a novel about that complicated emotion?
Aysegül Savas: It’s in part a book about the multiplicity of identities—Asya and Manu are different people with their parents, their friends, and with one another. They have multiple ways of feeling at home in the world.
SP: I loved the early description of Asya’s “little anthropologist,” the one her professor taught her to apply as a lens on all assumptions and cultural norms. Does every foreigner develop one of these? Do you have one?
AS: I studied anthropology in college so I think I’ve developed an inner anthropological lens for thinking about the world, just like Asya has. But being a foreigner is also a good education in viewing one’s life at a distance.
SP: You live and teach in Paris. I found myself picturing Paris parks and cafés throughout the novel, but Asya’s city remains unnamed throughout the book. Was this always your plan for the setting? How did that decision shape the storytelling for you?
AS: I wanted the book to be about the threshold between youth and adulthood more generally, rather than about a specific cultural experience. Though the city in the book is largely based on Paris where I live, it is not an exact representation. The challenge was to make the city feel real, to not make it bland and blurred in its abstraction.
SP: I found Asya and Manu’s relationship so devoted and familial—and I wonder if you think there’s something about living abroad that makes a couple particularly ‘fusionel’ as the French would say.
AS: I suppose that when you live abroad, or away from home, or in your hometown but in an entirely different configuration from your family, you have to be more deliberate about the people with whom you interact, who become your chosen family. The new habits and ways of being therefore have a stronger bond; a different magnetism that binds the family or couple together, and perhaps sets them apart from the surrounding society.
SP: Asya’s film project — and its philosophy of filming “the slow and leisurely rot of a day” in the park —made me think of our contemporary concerns about the attention economy and the impact of video apps/social media on our capacity to be present with reality, nature, etc. Was this theme on your mind when depicting these friends and their lifestyle?
AS: I wanted to pay attention to the different ways of being together, or being alone, and to cherish these small acts. It is true that technology has radically altered our attention, and I think that one way to resist this fragmentation of daily life is to notice all the ways in which we continue to be present. On the other hand, Asya and Manu are frequently talking on the phone or video with their parents and this is a new and valuable way of staying connected.
SP: Were you imagining any current documentarians when you envisioned Asya’s aesthetics/interests as a filmmaker?
AS: Yes, I was thinking of the work of Agnès Varda!
SP: The older women in the novel (her grandmother and mother back home; her neighbor Tereza; the chic regulars at the café) seem to play a big role in Asya’s character arc — and her evolving understanding of time’s passage. Can you talk about how these women entered the novel, and why they’re so important?
AS: I wanted the characters to belong to different generations, to give this sense of life and the various textures of age. Asya is thinking about how to live, and so it seemed important to present various options of what her future might look like, or what it may have looked like in a different life.
SP: Last but not least! What’s your favorite park?
AS: Montsouris, in the 14th arrondissement, where I live. Unlike Paris’s grand, elaborate “gardens” filled with statues and marked off lawns (Luxembourg, Tuileries) this park is wilder, and the grass isn’t off limits to picnickers and daydreamers!
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Check out Savas’s latest short story “Freedom to Move” in the New Yorker, and read the NY Times’s review of The Anthropologists here! You can read my full review of the novel here on Staff Picks.
