Utterly enchanting ... Even the most humdrum events resonate with importance when viewed through Savas’s meticulous and layered prose and plotting. Her storytelling is subtle but deliberate ... Savas has invited us to praise the unremarkable grace of Asya and Manu’s lives, and in the process, to pause and appreciate the beautiful textures of our own.
There is a naive simplicity to these episodes, which walk a very fine line between spareness and banality ... Genially low-stakes ... Passing time, the book suggests, is all that there is.
Savaş has written a book that reads like a fictional ethnography. It has the qualities of an empirical study, the only difference being that the subjects of this study are made-up characters ... Savaş approaches her novel with a keen awareness of the reality through which it crafts and filters its make-believe.
An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love ... In writing about "the slow and leisurely rot of a day", with all its delights and anxieties... the author has created something remarkable.
Intricate ... The prose, minimal and elegant, casts a well-rounded vision of existence, making clear that the small, mundane, day-to-day details are a large part of what makes a life ... Slow and quiet, existing finely within the details.
An engrossing, perceptive, and elegantly philosophical novel about the practice of paying close attention ... Asya is an acute and captivating narrator ... The Anthropologists is refreshing in its foregrounding of relatively low-stakes events.
Quirkily charming ... Savas delicately balances humor with pathos, supplying the droll details that make these ordinary lives shimmer as Asya and Manu gradually but inexorably change over the course of time.
Exceptional ... Savaş captures the singularity of the couple’s logic in lucid prose, and the real estate search gives shape to the spare and subtle narrative, as the couple’s indecisiveness and their affection for Ravi and Tereza keep readers guessing as to what they’ll do. It’s a masterpiece.
