It was Dorothy’s recommendation that took me to this unusual little book. Asya and her husband Manu are immigrants from different countries who met in college and live in an unnamed big city. Asya describes their lives over the course of several months as Manu goes off to his job every day and Asya goes to the park to make a documentary. They are in that time of life depicted by the TV show Friends; on their own, meeting up with friends in the bar, hosting visits of their parents, deciding how they want to live their lives. A main focus of the two is their search for an apartment.
The two seem to be looking at their actions and roles with clinical objectivity, like anthropologists. After a visit from Manu’s parents, Asya observes Manu this way:
The day of their departure, after we’d seen them off, we mopped and vacuumed the floors, changed sheets, and moved our things back to the bedroom. Manu opened a bottle of wine in the afternoon to signal that life was restored to its previous state, but I’d grown accustomed to him behaving as a son and couldn’t immediately readjust my sight.
Asya tells about a complaint she had about something Manu had done that she passed off at the time, then she says
I would probably bring it up at some point the next time we had an argument. I was good at overlooking grievances for a bit until I had enough stored up to pick a fight. Whenever we fought, entire lists would spill out of me to Manu’s surprise. I insisted that things never changed, counting the many instances when Manu had upset me in the same way and Manu replied that I was rounding things up too drastically, arriving at unreal conclusions.
Manu would remind her of their connection, and she eventually softened and agreed.
One idea that I have encountered elsewhere recently was considered here. Asya describes an anthropology professor at her college who became controversial while she was in school. He had spent his career studying a particular remote mountain village, its kinship ties, economy, and power dynamics. Someone from the village had become very famous and wrote a memoir about the hardships the villagers faced that touched the hearts of the majority ethnicity. She brought more attention to the village than an anthropologist could ever do. The professor wrote an article that revealed inaccuracies in the memoir, in particular that the writer herself had not suffered as the villagers she described did. Asya said the professor was wrong to counter the fundamental truth of what the woman had written about her village.
It was Zadie Smith interviewed by Ezra Klein about her most recent book Fraud that I thought of. In that book she tells the (true) story of a controversy in Victorian England that involved a man claiming to be the long lost Sir Roger Tichbourne. His Cockney accent charmed the lower classes and they wholeheartedly supported him, despite clear evidence he was a fraud. She explained that the lower class cheered on one of their own getting back at the establishment that regularly mistreated them. And she likened it to the outcome of the O.J. trial; finally, a Black man had bested the criminal justice system that so regularly treated Black people unfairly. The larger truth in these cases overcomes factual inaccuracy.
You have to love a book that makes you think of both the TV show Friends and Zadie Smith.
Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 179 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the public library.