A Valuable Life in a Precarious World: A Guest Post by Aysegül Savas
A reflection on the different components that make up a typical day in the lives of ordinary people. This is the perfect read for anyone who loves examining their friends and neighbors from an anthropological perspective. Read on for an exclusive essay from Aysegül Savas on writing The Anthropologists.
Paperback $17.99
The Anthropologists
The Anthropologists
In Stock Online
Paperback $17.99
Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas’ distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.
Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas’ distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.
This book expanded from a short story I wrote about a couple looking for an apartment to buy, and imagining the different ways their futures could take shape (“Future Selves” The New Yorker, March, 2021) While the novel is very different in tone and style from the story, it shares the same curiosity: how to make a life and how to commit to it.
I was intrigued by the structure of an apartment hunt as an existential quest: deciding to make a place one’s home brings with it many other decisions about how one will live their life, what their priorities will be, what they will have to sacrifice.
To “research” the lives of my characters, I asked many of our friends in Paris—most of them foreigners—about the rituals of their daily lives, their invented traditions, things they considered sacred. I accumulated a long list of the small ways in which people build meaning into their day, make it special, organize its various parts: morning coffee, afternoon runs, Friday night dates, TV shows, “family dinners” with friends. As Asya also explains in the novel, I was interested in the ways in which culture can be created outside of rooted systems, away from one’s homeland.
The Anthropologists is inspired by a time when I had set out to be a writer but hadn’t yet published anything—when there were so many possibilities ahead, when hanging out with friends took up entire nights and days, when there seemed to be little direction in our lives but a lot of curiosity. This was also a time when I read voraciously: I had never formally studied literature and was trying to educate myself in the “classics” though I was the one to decide which books these would be. This personal canon constitutes my most significant apprenticeship. Some of my most influential teachers from this period were Homer, Virginia Woolf, Natsume Soseki, Alice Munro , Roberto Bolaño, W.G Sebald, and Natalia Ginzburg. Reading their works, at a time when I had just moved to a new city and was trying to give shape to my life, provided me with a sense of belonging, and purpose.
I wrote the novel for those trying to create a valuable life in a precarious world, those who are not natives of any place, those who are goofy, who are dreamy, who are in love, who value friendship and the rituals daily life. Young people, artists, freelancers, immigrants, expatriates, international students, people with a “drinking spirit”!
