On Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists”

Early on in Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, the narrator, Asya, remembers a college professor’s advice to consider the mundane routines of daily life as subject for anthropological study. A young documentarian expat living in an unnamed foreign city with her husband, Manu, Asya imagines the “tiny anthropologist” hovering near, “taking notes on a flip chart,” when the days feel particularly aimless. “Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.” It is through the eyes of an external observer, Asya understands, the translation of drifting time into recognizable patterns and sentences, that a life’s purpose coheres.