Quarterlife Abroad in Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists
Read my interview with the author here!
Ayşegül Savaş opens her novel The Anthropologists with “a moment of panic,” the kind felt privately, or with an intimate partner: “We decided to look for a home. We’d been in the city for several years by then, and from time to time we worried that we weren’t living by the correct set of rules, that we should be making our lives sturdy.” From this first window into Asya’s inner life, we meet a person torn between her youth and her experience; she’s ready to feel settled, but that feeling alone can’t manifest a settled life. Youth, she says at one point, “seemed to belong to another time, when the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.”
I instantly recognized this feeling, a trademark of the period of transition that opens the novel. I thought of Satya Doyle Byock’s book Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, which had eased some of my own anxiety about this period. Byock, a psychoanalyst, draws from Jung to explore the tension between stability and meaning in the years between roughly 18 and 35. Quarterlife identifies four “pillars of growth” during these years: separate, listen, build, and integrate. Asya and Manu, thousands of miles from home, have certainly separated; the novel picks up right inside of the slow, uncharted, and occasionally messy process that follows.
Asya and Manu’s only real friend in their adopted city is Ravi, also a foreigner. “We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.” Asya, Manu, and Ravi bond by doing nothing—but together. “I love a good day of rotting,” Ravi says.
Asya is working on a documentary film. She receives a grant that will cover the bills for at least a year. In the introduction to the US edition of Sally Olds’s book People Who Lunch: On Work, Leisure, and Loose Living, the Melbourne-based writer describes Australian artists benefiting from unemployment insurance: “The overlap between welfare and the arts is so fundamental in Australia that it has furnished a national cliché—that all artists are dole-bludging layabouts. I’m not here to contest that,” she adds. “I’m here to enjoy it while it lasts. I’ve heard that to make art in America, you have to be rich or have rich parents… Americans, is that true?” Olds names something that also registered for me as I was reading this novel: that the artist’s life requires a different relationship to time, which inevitably requires financial patronage. This is one way Asya’s life will not feel relatable to most readers; in every other way, it probably will.
Artmaking and leisure are, nevertheless, not to be confused. The elision of the two in Savaş’s novel serves a purpose. “I just wanted to know how people lived—really lived,” Asya explains. She draws inspiration from Ravi’s line about rotting. “That’s what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.” And that’s what she does. She chooses a park near their apartment and proceeds to film it daily, eventually interviewing the park’s regular visitors. One of Asya’s newer friends, a native of the city, balks at this idea. “You can travel with that money,” she says. Of course, Asya is already traveling; she is already elsewhere.
Rotting with friends, Paris 2024.
She’s got artistic freedom. She’s also got that particularly dizzying form of freedom that accompanies early adulthood, a time when the longing for a settled life contrasts with the expansive possibilities and unknowns. To commit to a person—and to a place—takes courage, especially when that place is foreign: when you, therefore, only belong because you’ve decided to. Therefore, Asya’s documentary project serves as a quiet backdrop to her personal anthropological excavations. Perhaps one will shape the other.
I immediately took to Asya’s vision of being a stranger: that the best way to do it is without rules. Or rather, “constantly tipping beyond the rules we’d set for ourselves.” It’s an irreverence toward custom that might accompany an anthropology or art degree, sure, but it’s also a commitment to non-productive presence in the world. I thought of Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, part of which documents Odell’s experience of sitting daily by a rosebush in her local park and watching the birds. I thought of the recent film by Win Wenders, Perfect Days, which won at Cannes and follows a day in the life of a sanitation worker in Tokyo (played by Koji Yakusho) whose unselfconscious presence, gentleness, and attention offer a way of seeing, and a philosophy to accompany it: “Now is now,” he says to a young person he meets who has run away from home.
According to Odell’s How to Do Nothing and her most recent Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture, our modern era strips us of our peace, rest, and political will, simply through control over two precious resources: attention and time. In Savaş’s The Anthropologists, both are abundant. Maybe what gripped me in the story of Asya was in part the fantasy of her life: not only of remuneration for independent artmaking, but of copious unstructured time, along with a project that requires paying close attention to the world.
No matter what we’re fleeing, or moving toward, we must have a relationship with the present. “What we wanted to find in the city,” Asya narrates, “were people with whom we could abandon the rules even as we were establishing them, those people who could become our family.”
“I love a good day of rotting,” Ravi says.
Rotting with friends, Paris 2022.
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The years since the pandemic have proliferated colloquialisms like “bedrotting”; “burnout”; “quiet quitting,” and our literature inevitably reflects these new moods. The Anthropologists can be said to join the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 masterpiece, My Year of Rest and Relaxation—the ur-text of bedrotting long before the term plastered the walls of the internet, and a burnout satire for the ages. Asya’s world-weariness doesn’t quite resemble that of Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator, and that could be a demographic difference: Moshfegh writes a native New Yorker, whereas Asya covets the ease of the native. She is still world-weary, though. Like the narrator of My Year, Asya’s got cognitive dissonance, disappointment, unspecified guilt, directionlessness, political malaise. (It’s a menu I recognize.) And yet there’s an equanimity to Asya’s voice that resembles the private quiet of sitting behind a camera lens. The lens, more than a visa or a permanent residence, seems to empower Asya to let her gaze linger. But the city itself, like in Moshfegh, appears blurry; the sharpest details are the human ones.
A book narrated by a filmmaker can only be convincing if the view through her lens renders well on the page: that is, if we like seeing as she does. Indeed, the novel unfolds as a testament to Savaş’s acute sight, her balance of the mundane and the sublime in something as everyday as Asya’s video call to her mother: “She leaned into the screen so I mostly saw her neck, saggier than it would appear if she were sitting across from me… I felt angry that she wasn’t self-conscious about the way she looked. She couldn’t just let go of herself, I protested silently. She had to stand up to time.”
The book’s got anthropological insight into long-term committed relationships, too, like the way couples develop their own encyclopedia of linguistic norms and inside references. “We had nicknames for each other, words with no meaning in any dictionary… And we had a name for the two of us: the Ts, short for a word we’d invented more than a decade ago, which signified two people who were in love, who were a little sad… and it was with great tenderness that we noticed the quality of being a T in others, and bestowed on them our own title.”
A few chapters into the novel, I already felt like I had been bestowed with belonging by these self-appointed outsiders. Hanging out with Ravi, Manu, and Asya is fun. Their anthropological debates feel tense yet pleasurable. Ravi is often the most savage of the three, but it always leads to a great conversation. Of a movie character, he says contemptuously, “I bet she’d leave a party early because of her morning run.” He prefers people who have “the drinking spirit”: those who, “when offered another round, would not refuse by making a point of their individual needs. Regardless of whether or not they were drinking, they’d welcome the continuation of the evening. This was one of the most important characteristics, he concluded, in a decent person. It was the embodiment of generosity.”
The friends are trying to see through the customary to something deeper, more meaningful, and more free. They’re building adulthood from the ground up, without the traditional trappings of their home countries, and without the imperatives of conformity. This was what attracted me to the somnambulant narration in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and it’s likewise what allures about The Anthropologists: both of these twenty-something women can see through convention to something else, and they use their social position to carve out space for a kind of agency, albeit one rather divorced from reality. Is it anti-establishment—even anti-capitalist—to rot all day? Does the Bartleby-esque refusal to be doing anything at all have political efficacy?
After all, conformity has its comforts, and ritual is the cousin of tradition. During a dinner party, Asya walks into the room carrying platters of food. Her friend Lena, the native of the city, calls her “the picture of a perfect housewife.” Asya laughs; Manu does not. How real are the rules of society? Asya and Manu, for all intents and purposes, have a traditional life. They’re buying an apartment. They’re settling down. Asya wants their adult life to involve sumptuous, languorous evenings of entertaining; she wants easy company, easy conversation, the drinking spirit. But the more of the outside world she allows into her bubble, the more she must see Manu—and their relationship—through others’ eyes. “I guess I’m just bourgeois and predictable,” Manu says bitterly after Lena leaves that night.
For someone who sees into the world so deeply, Asya still manages to miss a lot, and as we learn her limits, we start to see that rotting is, in fact, not passive. Time becomes a character in the novel, haunting individuals but also masking itself behind the circuitry of routine. It’s no mistake that many older women appear in the novel—grandmothers, neighbors, regulars in her new life. Asya recognizes one posh older woman at her local café as a famous filmmaker and starts privately referring to her as the Great Dame. But the Great Dame wants anonymity, perhaps as a refuge from time. When another older woman falls on the sidewalk in front of the café, Asya notices that the Great Dame hasn’t “shown any interest in the scene unraveling right in front of her,” while a dozen people surround the fallen woman to assist her. Once standing, the woman gestures to the Great Dame and says she’s her neighbor. “We’ll go home together,” she says. “At our age, we need each other’s company.” Asya doesn’t miss a single nuance: “I saw something like anger in the Great Dame’s face. Or was it horror? I understood that, like the rest of us, she was terrified her life was passing her by.”
Unreliable narrators are always anthropologists. (Some of my favorites are Nick in Gatsby, Esther in The Bell Jar, and David in Giovanni’s Room.) It’s not that they see clearly; it’s that they don’t---but we want, nevertheless, to see with them. We appreciate the diegetic narrator for their capacity as a reporter whose perspective can exceed the visible—can, in fact, uncover the invisible. Insider/outsider, the observer has privilege––of information, of narrative control. What they do not have is trust. In that space between our own anthropological wisdom and a narrator’s, we find something expansive. Byock, the psychoanalyst, cites Joseph Campbell: “If there is a path, it is someone else’s.” We’re all here to observe, but then we have to step out from behind the camera and live.
I tend to believe that two of the best novels of the past five years have the word “trust” in their titles—Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Hernan Diaz’s Trust—because in our age of misinformation and attention overload, we flee to novels for an alternative to the frenetic paranoia of media and news. A book called The Anthropologists plays with the same symbolism: here is a place where we will observe. Fiction can’t be relied on for the factual, but it is a reliably safe place to doubt, judge, mistrust, and disagree; it is a place where our attention can sustain itself on itself. We need our first-person narrators to feel both respectable and unreliable; we need to be able to exceed them in some way, if only in our knowledge that their perspective is limited. In every other way, the narrator is in control, and in The Anthropologists, handing over that control—gazing through Asya’s lens—feels like rest, relaxation, and a balm for the post-pandemic soul.
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