Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?
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.
