Infra-ordinary People

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş. Bloomsbury Publishing, 179 pages. 2024.

Over three days in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Long invested in a playful embrace of constraint, Perec was a member of the Oulipo movement, which used radically restrictive rules to shape literature; for example, Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter e, an absence that referenced the loss of his mother in the Holocaust and his father in the fighting that preceded it. Perec was also a champion of what he called the “infra-ordinary”: the more than ordinary, the ordinary observed so closely that it becomes transcendent, edging closer to life itself. He wanted to widen art’s vision; he wanted to accomplish this by focusing it.

Why is this important? Because, Perec argued, if we can learn how to “speak of these ‘common things,’” which he describes as “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious . . . the background noise, the habitual,” we can stop doing what we default to, which is to “sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.” Instead, we can give the fundamental elements of daily life “a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.” To do this, he believed, we must approach the everyday with an engaged, patient curiosity. “What’s needed perhaps,” Perec concludes, “is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.”

Roughly fifty years later, another Parisian writer, Ayşegül Savaş, who settled in France following an international upbringing in Turkey, Denmark, and England and who now teaches at the Sorbonne, has picked up Perec’s charge. Savaş, the author of two prior novels, Walking on the Ceiling and White on White, both about young women alone in cities, continues her literary investigations into early adulthood, the condition of being an emigrant, friendship across generations, family life, and art-making in her newest novel, The Anthropologists, narrated by an anthropology student named Asya who becomes a documentary filmmaker. Asya does what Perec urges: she turns the camera on her own world. The result is an engrossing, perceptive, and elegantly philosophical novel about the practice of paying close attention.

When The Anthropologists opens, Asya is happily partnered with Manu, whom she met as a university student in an unnamed country foreign to both. Though Asya and Manu come from different places, they experience a sense of recognition in the other, and together, they form their own culture and their own shared language: “The other person was our native country, even if we didn’t know a word of each other’s mother tongues.” They call themselves, endearingly, the Ts, “two people who were in love, who were a little sad, a little misfortunate, who had always been somewhat clumsy and lonely.” After living in small towns, they have settled in an unnamed city (one that seems European and shares some attributes with Paris) in a rented apartment. They are still young but at an age at which life feels less provisional. They want to “make things a bit more solid” and decide to look for “a home,” an apartment to purchase that will allow them to feel more rooted in place.

The plot is structured by their apartment search and by a documentary film that Asya has been awarded a grant to make; as the focus of the film, in a Perecian move, she settles on a public park north of where they live. By filming the park, Asya hopes to “capture the slow and leisurely rot of a day.” Previously, Asya has traveled to make documentaries, but now, she finds, “I didn’t want to travel anywhere, to investigate the ways of other places, but to remain in the city and establish some rules.” In what could be a mission statement for the novel, she hopes to “film daily life, to praise its unremarkable grace.”

Asya is an acute and captivating narrator, and as we get to know her world, we experience a slow build of intimacy, like the deepening of a relationship with an acquaintance who gradually becomes well known to us. We learn about her and Manu’s life in the city, their domestic routines, their families, and their cast of friends. This cast include the amusing Ravi, who loves dive bars and believes in late nights and what he calls “the drinking spirit,” by which he means good-natured conviviality and willingness to continue a good time; Lena, their “only native friend,” intense and prone to drama, who develops romantic interest in Ravi; Tereza, their elderly upstairs neighbor and a kindred soul; Sara, a friend from out of town who periodically comes to stay with them and who hits it off with Ravi, too, to Lena’s chagrin; and a group of well-heeled, professionally accomplished expats gathered by a woman named Sharon with whom true closeness seems impossible. Asya calls this last group “the foreigners” with a knowing humor, as she herself is also a foreigner. These relationships, though generally playful and affectionate, carry a certain gravity: “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.”

The Anthropologists takes the form of brief vignettes concerning Asya’s life, their titles suggestive of ethnography, including, for example, “Daily Life,” “Music,” “Division of Labor,” “Principles of Kinship,” and “Thresholds.” Asya has, we learn, been equipped with these categories by her coursework in anthropology. Savaş’s gentle brand of humor is on display in the distance between the clinical-sounding titles of the vignettes, which promise a generalized knowledge, and the personal and specific nature of what they contain. For example, one section, titled “Privacy,” concerns Asya’s attempt to have a video chat with her mother over tea and cake; her grandmother, who has recently moved in with Asya’s mother, joins them uninvited. Asya loves her grandmother but would like time alone with her mother; her attempts to hint at this fail. Stymied, Asya says to her mother, “I’ll call you later,” and both her mother and grandmother reply, as one, “All right.”

Asya’s studies in anthropology have not been uniformly enlightening. As a student, in love with Manu and seeking to spend time with him, she once spent a summer conducting fieldwork for her thesis in his home city, where she attempted to gather information about a checklist of subjects that included “kinship structures, gift exchange, rituals, costumes, notions of the sacred and the profane.” But as Asya wryly observes, “I found my subjects self-explanatory, if not a little disappointing. . . . It was just life, in a somewhat ugly town. There were afternoon snacks of Fanta and stale vanilla cake. The children that came to the center wore sneakers and had cell phones. They listened to the same pop songs as the rest of the world.”

If anthropology proved less than revelatory in that case, or rather if what it revealed was only that globalization and technology have made ways of being across cultures increasingly generic, the discipline has equipped Asya with a way to organize her thoughts about the world, which, we learn, has long been useful in making sense of a life without geographical and cultural continuity. As a student, Asya encountered a professor who encouraged the class to observe their own lives through an anthropological lens; Asya imagined a “tiny Martian,” whose perspective she could sometimes inhabit to make her relatively unrooted life—conducted “in makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place”—more legible.

So anthropology grounds Asya. At the same time, the novel gestures to the discipline’s troubled past, with its colonial underpinnings and tendency to exploit, extract, and other its subjects. One interestingly unsettled story that Asya tells concerns an ethical dilemma in the field. An anthropology professor devotes his life to studying a small rural village. When a villager writes a memoir that is “a heart-wrenching story of poverty and danger,” she becomes famous and draws more attention to the plight of her people than did the anthropologist over a lifetime of work. But he later unmasks her account as a dishonest composite; she herself “belonged to the village’s elite” and has presented others’ hardships as her own. In response to the story, Manu argues that it is the professor’s duty to make known the truth; Asya disagrees. She sees the professor as “greedy” and “petty” and thinks the woman “hadn’t done something so terrible.” Later, though, she continues to disapprove of the professor but comes to “[mistrust] the woman’s process of abstraction, simply because I’d grown weary of life in the abstract. For most of the people we were acquainted with, Manu and I were nothing more than our countries of origin, our accents, our work. And I yearned for a specific existence.”

As this might suggest, the novel is less interested in critiquing the discipline of anthropology than in recuperating it. Focusing not on the exotic but on Perec’s endotic, Asya uses anthropology’s tools to regard her own specific life and surroundings with curiosity and distance, allowing her to better understand them and to see their meaning and worth. This comes through in the monologues delivered by people she interviews in the park, interspersed throughout the novel, each movingly specific, and in the dinners that she and Manu share with their neighbor Tereza, where they read poems aloud: “In Tereza’s presence, the world seemed less urgent. The poems cleared space in us and filled us with their shapes. Sitting around the table, I felt that we should try and live like this, reassembling the world in poetry, where things were a little lopsided.”

A productive tension arises between Asya’s desire for a “specific existence,” with its humanizing potential, and the novel’s sometimes abstracted register: countries are never named; politics, history, and, to a large extent, modern technology are absent. The effect is gently fablelike, a bit Calvino-ish. By downplaying cultural and historical markers, the novel highlights individual characters and the values and behaviors of their milieus, which Savaş excels at drawing in quick, incisive strokes. “It was often the case, for people our age, that an interesting job was tantamount to being an interesting person,” Asya says of the educated, cosmopolitan set to which she belongs, though she herself rejects the idea.

If Asya and Manu’s social world defies various kinds of linguistic and national homogeneity, it does share a set of mores to do with social class: what defines “the foreigners,” a “groomed and accomplished” group, are their professional achievements and economic security, which underpin “their cheer, their well-rounded lives, the hobbies they tended to like delicate gardens” and “the confidence with which they claimed their place in the city.” There is an insistence on surface-level relationships. Asya chafes at the fact that “the friendships didn’t evolve in frequency or intimacy.” These are not the people to whom one can turn in times of hardship, unlike Asya’s father’s friends who, “though none of them were very well off,” lend each other money in times of significant need, even if doing so may entail hardship. For better or worse, in the generally comfortable, mobile, and educated world in which Asya moves, the fundamental unit of support is the couple. Family resources are, of course, presumably on offer to these couples, even if, like Asya and Manu, their families’ incomes are “modest” and “the currencies of our native countries were constantly losing value.” Asya is well-positioned to observe the cost of this sort of independence. She grapples with it by, among other things, offering food and friendship to Tereza, or seeking out new depths in her relationships outside of “the foreigners,” like those with Ravi, Lena, and Sara.

Bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on her life also makes it clear to Asya that our lives need rituals, which give them meaning and bind us together, as do the rituals that she and Manu have established: “While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across from each other, face-to-face. There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths. So these small things mattered.”

Small does not mean inconsequential. These small things are, of course, life itself, and when attended to, become as large as each of our lives is to us. The Anthropologists is refreshing in its foregrounding of relatively low-stakes events: Asya and Manu’s relationship has its ups and downs but is fundamentally happy; the apartment search is sometimes discouraging, but not crushingly so; Asya’s documentary proceeds as planned, though she worries that her family and friends will find it strange, and a litany of people do react with a lack of comprehension. Her grandmother tells her, “Forget about daily life. No one cares about that.” When Asya brings up the idea that she might capture something “emotionally new,” her grandmother tartly replies, “Don’t complicate the point. We named you for a continent and you’re filming a park.” One friend wonders why she doesn’t use the money to travel. Her father, unable to understand how her choice of subject might be meaningful, cautions, “You have to do work that matters to you.” But of course, this work does matter. The dailiness is the point.

At the novel’s end, Asya has succeeded in making her life sturdier. She has come to see, too, the universal in the specific. “All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park,” she says. “I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, positioning them in fluid conversation, I’d begun to understand that there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of the day.” By examining the ordinary until it reveals itself as the infra-ordinary, as Perec counseled, she’s made her own path through those hours speak of what it is we truly are: united, in our specificity, by the need for structure and meaning, our desires for some rules and for the people with whom we can break them. Through Asya’s comic, wise, and illuminating scrutiny, a new anthropology is founded, one that shows us how to be awake to our own days’ unremarkable grace.