by D.W. White
July 18, 2024
The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas; Bloomsbury Publishing; 192 pages; $24.99.
Language is a strange thing. It exists both within and without, it is constant yet dynamic, and while it lay beyond the individual, it nonetheless seems to belong to us—after all, who doesn’t have favorite words, preferred expressions, distinctive turns of phrase? In speaking, to another or oneself, it is language which is called upon to translate our thoughts into something comprehensible to the world writ large. The rules of language are much like the rules of life—mutable, constraining, elusive, stark. From where do these prescripts come, we might ask? In her third novel, The Anthropologists, Ayşegül Savaş circles this Wittgensteinian question—in so many words—arriving at an answer the mercurial philosopher might have enjoyed: some admixture of the self, poetry, and the simple asking of the question itself.
The book traces a clear lineage from Savaş’ previous work, especially 2021’s White on White, handling topics of modern angst and identity in a detached, clear-eyed manner through a precise first-person narration meted out over short, sharp vignettes. Asya, our heroine, is married to her soul mate, living in a foreign city (unnamed, but bearing a notable resemblance to Paris), attempting at once to make headway on the documentary project for which she’s received funding and address the type of large-scale existential matters—buying a home and having a child—that plague thirty-somethings the world over. In this way she contributes to a rising archetype of the contemporary protagonist, a surprising number of whom receive affable grants to work on esoteric art projects while debating what to make for dinner. For Asya, it is a film of the local park, through which she hopes to determine something about the state of modern life, emanating from a precocious interest in the domestic and the quotidian; as she tells us, it was “a process of empathy”…to film “the slow and leisurely rot of a day.” While something of an opportunity is missed in the recurring, present-tense sections relating snippets of the stories she learns while filming—the relatively muted use of this technique leaves the narration, on the whole, a touch pedestrian—Asya’s artistic practice nonetheless defines the novel’s tonal register, which approaches the world as a thing to examine, with the detached sympathy that Savaş handles well, even as it prevents her heroine from lending to her account the sort of difficult interiority that might have elevated The Anthropologists to a more profound mediation on the intersection of artistic practice with daily life.
There were tragedies of the highest order that upended ordinary life, the ones that ushered in deviations of kindness. Then there was life itself, at every turn a devastation, which nevertheless did nothing to stall its flow.
The following day, I packed my equipment early and went to the park.In a different approach to narration, we might be allowed to know what exactly these tragedies, deviations, and devastations looked like, to see them via our protagonist’s inner world. But Asya simply doesn’t give us very much; the reader feels the burden of interpretive labor, expected to pour emotional depth into the book as waiting vessel. In this way one can perceive the current literary landscape refracted through The Anthropologists, which like most contemporary novels is subjected to countervailing forces, within and without marketplace pressures. On one side is the basic instinct of the artist, as it’s always been—to render their work such that it takes on a complex, compelling dimension, that it to some extent obscures, that it moves from the pure didacticism of the essay to the crafted artistry of the story. Against this are arrayed the evangelical mandates of directness, transparency, and sincerity generated by our current socio-cultural climate, demanding that everything be said out in the open, with a total and self-seriousness earnestness. The message must be carried. For most, the latter overwhelms the former, often resulting in a sort of mawkishness, not an interesting Sontagian camp but a trendy, superfluous affectation which disguises certain aspects of a novel’s composition—be it the city in which it takes place or quotation marks around dialogue—re-introducing a measure of obfuscation in an attempt to answer those artistic impulses vitiated by contemporary mores. Paradoxical as it may seem, the result are novels that ask more of the reader by priding themselves on avoiding the challenges of “experimental”—better known as risk-adept—fiction. As exemplified in the quote above, The Anthropologists fits fairly within this paradigm by dint of its architecture and poetics alike, moving so swiftly as to at times gloss over crucial moments in our narrator’s life. Nonetheless Savaş is certainly among the more interesting writers of this mood; her latest, despite a lack of interiority, is more successful than most, mostly avoiding the thinness endemic to current literature on account of the breadth of her ideas and an ability to bring them out via the talent of her prose.
In part this is due to what we are given: a deceptively smooth struggle to comprehend the rules, both of language and of life, by which Asya and Manu wish to follow. Savaş’ invocation of the word rule itself, especially in the book’s first half, gives to her novel its Wittgensteinian ring, bringing to mind discursions on the locus of meaning and the difficulties of translation, be it from one language to another or one’s own thoughts into conversation.
The foreigners gathered regularly, but were careful not to overstep the rules of the group: the meetings and the friendships didn’t evolve in frequency or intimacy. Perhaps this was why we felt foreign to the foreigners
--Ravi, Manu, and I—because we were constantly tipping beyond the rules we’d set for ourselves…And what we wanted above all, what we wanted to find in the city, were people with whom we could abandon the rules even
as we were establishing them, those people who could become our family.
Asya’s attempts to fit in with the city’s natives, alongside her desire to remain connected to her family back home, generate the majority of that emotional resonance, deftly realizing the isolation one can feel even within healthy relationships. The Anthropologists functions as fine illustration of the impossibility of private language, as Asya and Manu’s many idiosyncratic neologisms cannot bridge the gap they feel between themselves and the city, their families, and their future.
Savaş is at her best in description, and when she does allow Asya to turn her attention inward, the results are effective: “I wanted to tell her to let go,” she tells us, of watching a neighbor of her family comfort her grandmother on a Zoom call, “And I had an urge to apologize to them all.” These moments are compelling less for their honesty and more for their individuality—most of us have experienced isolation, loneliness, angst over important decisions and nostalgia for friends and family; what’s interesting, in a novel, is how the protagonist navigates these things, and what that might tell us about her as a unique person. While the contemporary novel still has to relearn such a notion, Savaş has largely understood it, a trend found in all of her works to date. The Anthropologists carries this on, crafting a story built of language and cooly oriented towards truth.
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Rules of Engagement: Language, Truth, and Storytelling in The Anthropologists
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Clarisse Croset from Unsplash
D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. He serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches classes on Rachel Cusk and the Self.
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