Name: Anthropologists
Rating: 4.181818181818182 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9781639733064

AysegA1/4l Savas

Anthropologists

Giovana 

Where do I feel most like myself? I don't know how to answer that question. I guess I'm still looking.

We stood looking at the living room, crammed with our life. Already, we had discussed leaving most of these things behind when we moved. The artworks would be more refined, the furnishings statelier and few in number. But it seemed now like a betrayal.

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn't quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn't want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.

I felt stifled by the clarity of my knowledge, which seemed unreal, or too real. As if everyone ended up living the same sort of life, describing it with the same words. With enough focus, I could probably predict our lives as well, the types of people we would resemble. There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options. But just now, I preferred not to think about it too much.

Mika

“Manu and I simply got along: we could sit together in silence; we didn’t really work to maintain a state of harmony. I felt secure with him, like being indoors during a downpour.”

Aysegül Savas

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? Can they create their own traditions and rituals? Whom can they consider family?

As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.

The Anthropologists

A beautiful, thoughtful examination of both the immigrant and millennial experience. True to its title, the novel feels like an anthropological study of both Asya and Manu as immigrants adapting to a society from which they may ever be separate and of that very foreign society with which they interact. 

But perhaps I am biased as I saw so much of my own experience reflected in the novel, painfully accurate, as if we all have lived the same life.

A beautiful, thoughtful examination of both the immigrant and millennial experience. True to its title, the novel feels like an anthropological study of both Asya and Manu as immigrants adapting to a society from which they may ever be separate and of that very foreign society with which they interact. 

But perhaps I am biased as I saw so much of my own experience reflected in the novel, painfully accurate, as if we all have lived the same life.

ehhh — there’s not much plot in this; is an attempt of an “ethnography” of sorts to document the mundane and the ordinary lives of a migrant couple, asya and manu. from asya’s pov, we see how they navigate the unnamed city they’re in while feeling extra foreign and not “home”, even though they’re crafting their home with the cast of characters: ravi (who i hate), lena (who i think is my id), and tereza (only person i like in the book). it’s interesting to me how their cultures remain unnamed, how the city was never mentioned, and how there’s no description at all of the other characters’ physicalities (except for the ones that pretty much related to a “vibe”—e.g., the grand dame being looming and imposing)—so everyone kinda feels like a blank slate where you can project your feelings of precarious un-belongingness. but where that could be seen as strength for some feels as a sore point for me wahaha i don’t think i’m the audience for this and tbh i don’t really want to huhuhu

This was like reading the plot of my life, a migrant away from home from decades, in a country that is my “home” now but still feel unrooted, building community and watching loved ones through a phone. The structure was interesting 

Marion

They make a big deal about their friend leaving and the possibility of the grandma dying but then never reflect on their upstairs neighbor with dementia that felt like family? Gutted by the end frankly. 

Jeremy Boyd

M Puspita

Wow wow wow. Ich liebe dieses Buch. Es hat etwas mit mir gemacht, auf eine ganz sanfte und subtile Weise.

Ayşegül Savaş thematisiert sensible Fragen wie: Wann ist man erwachsen? Wann kann man eine fremde Stadt als sein Zuhause bezeichnen? Was bedeutet es, angekommen zu sein? Wie möchte man leben? Was bedeutet Kinderwunsch? Wie fühlt es sich an, weit weg von seinen Eltern zu leben und einen ganz anderen Alltag zu führen als sie? Was bedeutet Freundschaft?

Es sind Themen, mit denen sich fast jeder irgendwann Ende zwanzig beschäftigt, die Savaş mit einer so nüchternen, aber starken Sprache in ihrem Roman behandelt. Dabei beschreibt sie ein Paar, das eine innige Beziehung führt und sich in einem Prozess der Selbstfindung befindet.

Ich habe das Buch sehr genossen und mich in vielen Themen dieses Buches wiedergefunden.

Anthropologists

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