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The Book Review
Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Renovation,' by Kenan Orhan
00:42:40
Dilara, the heroine of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel, is a Turkish exile living in Italy and undergoing a routine bathroom renovation that turns out to be not so routine: When the contractors leave, she steps in and finds herself somehow transported to an actual cell in Istanbul’s infamous Silivri Prison. On this week's episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Renovation” with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim.
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- [00:00]
A
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B
hello and welcome to another book club episode of the Book Review. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review. And for Book Club this week, we're chatting about the Renovation by Kanan Orhan. The Renovation is a bold, ambitious debut novel with an instantly intriguing conceit. It's about a woman who discovers that her bathroom has been transformed into a prison cell. And I read it on a whim just because I heard that conceit. I had a free weekend and I wanted to get lost in something, but then I couldn't stop thinking about it. And then I was like, I want to talk to other people about it. And then I realized, wait a second, mj, you run a book club. Just make it your book club pick and you can force people to talk with you about it. So that's what we're here to do today. And joining me in that adventure are two of my esteemed colleagues. Joumana Khatib. Hi, Jomana.
- [01:26]
C
Hi, mj.
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B
You are a fan favorite. You were here last week talking about on the calculation of volume.
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C
That's right. And also the reading for last week's podcast did have the feeling of like a hostage negotiation. But you did not force me to read this at all like I was. I enjoyed every page of this book.
- [01:44]
B
I'm so excited to dive in more. And also with us is Dave Kim. Hi, Dave. Hello.
- [01:48]
D
I'm stoked to be here. Mj. Thank you for inviting me.
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B
Of course. It's been a while. I think you were here last in what, November to talk about book awards. Is that the last time you were maybe.
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C
Tragic.
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D
No. Was it Adam Ross? No, that was at the beginning of last year. Yeah. My sense of time. Time is completely off.
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C
We just let Dave out of prison.
- [02:08]
D
That's right.
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B
Thank you for joining us. It's Been a long time, but welcome back. So that's our panel, but before we dive into the book itself, I have a few typical admin notes. You know the drill. First, there will be spoilers in this episode. However, we know that this is a brand spanking new book. Readers are still discovering it. We don't wanna put off anyone who doesn't wanna be spoiled. So the first half of this conversation will be spoiler free. We'll talk about setup stuff, we'll talk about opinions and ideas and themes and all that good stuff. But we will hold revelations about the ending to the second half of the episode, which will be spoiler filled. That's note number one. Note number two is at the end of the episode, we will reveal our May book club book. So stay with us to find out what we're reading next. And without further ado, let's talk about the renovation to get started. Xumana, can you set the table and tell us what is this book? What is the renovation?
- [03:01]
C
Oh boy, oh boy. I'm so excited. Okay, so even just from the shortest of summaries, I knew I was gonna like this book. Cause the conceit is crazy. So we are in Italy. We are in the sort of rather cramped apartment occupied by Dilara and her husband, who are a Turkish couple that left Turkey under some political pressure with Dilara's father, who has rather advanced Alzheimer's. And they've sought refuge in Italy. And it's becoming increasingly clear that Dilara's father can't live independently. And so even though money is rather tight because d' Lara hasn't been able to find work and her husband's working as a mechanic, they need to renovate their bathroom to accommodate Dilara's father after the workers are finished. Dilara's been very good about resisting the urge to look under the tarp while the renovation has been going on.
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B
Well, she tries to peek and they're like, no.
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C
And they put up second door.
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B
Right, okay.
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C
Really Right. She got it. Anyway, she has much more self restraint than I. So they pack it up, they leave, mission accomplished. But then she enters the bathroom and it's actually a prison cell. And she recognizes it as a cell from a specific prison in Istanbul, the Silivri prison, which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, prison in Europe and the site of torture and abuse and all sorts of nightmares. Okay, this is amazing, right? This is so good.
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B
From the opening line. The opening line is just, I don't know by what accident the builders managed it. But instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom. They had installed a prison cell. We're in.
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C
It's so good. It, like, reminds me of a line from in the Loop where they're, like, making fun of builders who had done something wrong. And they're like, builders are never the heroes of a story because they're builders. I can't do the Scottish brogue, but it's great. But I was like, oh, the builders are the heroes. This is an incredible premise. And so basically, the bathroom slash prison cell becomes a sort of threshold for Dallara. And I think it actually literalizes an experience that a lot of people in exile or who are living away from their homeland feel, which is you feel some comfort when you think back to what you've left behind, but you're also imprisoned in many ways by your memory or by your circumstance. And anyway, it's a jumping off point for a lot of elegant ideas about leaving home behind and all those difficult calculations.
- [05:37]
B
I would only add two other things. One quick one is that, like, part of the animated tension is that Dallara finds herself really drawn to this literal prison because she so deeply misses her home. And so that tension is, like, how much freedom is she willing to give away for a taste of home? And then the other thing is that her husband, at the end, the book, is split into many parts, but toward the beginning, her husband runs away. And so all of a sudden, we have this kind of countdown clock. She has dwindling funds, and so she needs to figure out how to live her life in Italy. But she's also being drawn to. To this prison cell. And so that's part of the animating tension.
- [06:17]
C
And the prison cell is rather porous for, like, a fantastical prison cell. I mean, basically, she's able to, like, come and go as she pleases. There's no sort of impetus to keep her from going back and forth.
- [06:29]
B
It almost becomes, like, in her home, like, a quiet room. A quiet room for her, a retreat, which is crazy.
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C
A me room.
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B
Yeah, a me room. But the me room happens to be, like, an infamous prison. Dave, is there anything that you would add.
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D
Yeah, that it's actually in the prison. It's not just the prison cell designed to look like a prison cell in Salivary. It's actually a portal that takes her to S' Livri prison and is a cell in a woman's block there.
- [06:58]
B
So that's. I guess the other tension is it's like, okay, I'm going into this prison, literal prison, to escape, but can they Come through the other door and find us. There's a sense of danger that runs as an undercurrent throughout.
- [07:11]
C
Well, and one of the guards, or I think it's one of the guards tells her, or maybe it's somebody else she's talking to about this, but they basically are saying like, oh, we're rounding up people faster than we can build space. So like, basically the government is take. Is claiming any available real estate they can to like build out the prison. And it's literally you can run, but you can't hide.
- [07:32]
B
So that is the setup of the book. And it's funny because we've been talking so long about the setup, but I think that is a testament to just how complex and rich it is. But that's the setup. Now I just want to know, big picture, top level, broadly speaking, how do you feel about this book? Give me a vibe check. Love this book. Hate this book. What did he make you think about? Tell me your thoughts.
- [07:52]
D
Sure. I mean, I love this book and what I liked most about it was I think what is going to put off some readers, which is the different registers that Orhan is writing in. He's trying to occupy two different, two very different literary modes. One is the realm of fable, of allegory. The first name that comes to mind for me is Kafka. A narrative in which there are certain obviously absurd conditions that are in an otherwise pretty realistic environment. And those weird things, these weird circumstances serve as kind of stand ins for an internal issue. And for Kafka, let's say a social condition or a social problem or something like that. So it's a very well established tradition. This is not a book that is I would put in the Sci Fi column. It's not so concerned with the world building, of justifying why this phenomenon happens. Why what? How the whole mechanism of this prison cell works. It just sort of accepts it as a given and then moves on. So that's sort of one mode that he's writing in. The other is a kind of social realism. Right. It very much digs into the factual history of recent events in Turkey. Recent ish events in Turkey going back to the Arab Spring and the Gezi park protests, the rule of Erdogan, the repression and the earthquake that happened and the attempted coup in 2016. And all of these real events are also dealt with and analyzed in really sharp ways. I think what is so confounding is that he flips back and forth between these two registers and you're really not supposed to do that. It breaks, like the first rule of allegory, which is you don't explain what it is you're allegorizing. Right. You don't name. You certainly don't name the problem. Right. You don't invoke Erdogan's name.
- [10:10]
B
There's a podcast I love, 99% invisible, and they did a TED Talk about flag design. And he talks about one of the cardinal rules is you don't put words on your flag, because if you need words on your flag, your symbolism has failed. Similarly, for allegory, if you need to name what you're trying to allegorize, then your allegory has failed. And yet he does it here.
- [10:32]
D
Exactly. It's like telling your punchline as you're telling the joke. It undercuts the whole purpose of the allegory.
- [10:39]
B
But it works here.
- [10:40]
D
You said it shouldn't work, and it works. And that's what I think drew me most to this book, is that the rules that govern this universe are constantly changing. We think, okay, fine, I'll accept that this is a weird world in which portals just open up. Fine. But then we're back in a kind of very real, you know, real world where that is governed by regular laws of physics. And he's sort of flipping between those two modes, just as, let's say Dallara is flipping between these two realities.
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B
What makes it work?
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D
What makes it work is that the realistic part of the narrative, the thing that we're allegorizing, let's say explaining all of that, doesn't actually dumb down this book, it actually makes it more complex, it deepens the narrative, and they become sort of complementary and start to blur into one another and blur into each other.
- [11:41]
C
Part of why that works so well is because the reality of living under Erdogan, when you can be like a former professor in your 70s, sort of writing and thinking about politics, and yet be the subject of be forced to flee because you're considered a danger to the state. It's like when we meet Dilara's father. He can hardly, like, clean himself, but somehow he's like this threat to what is otherwise presented as this, like, all powerful, like, roaring autocracy. And I think it does capture the absurdity of, and frankly the heartbreak inherent in living under those conditions and being forced to flee them and yet still missing home, even though you had to leave under those circumstances, so.
- [12:25]
D
So that the real becomes the absurd and the absurd becomes the real. And I think he does that really well.
- [12:32]
B
What about you, Jomar? What did you think, broadly speaking? And like what did you focus on or think about?
- [12:39]
C
I really clocked Dilara's rage. To me, this is a book about like profound anger and, and I love seeing it, particularly in a book that is so much about confinement because that's when you really feel that tension where it's like Lara is running out of money. She has Italian, but it's inflected with a Turkish accent. And the Italians are kind of skeptical of her and her husband and they think they're Arabs, which is I think kind of rather insulting for a Turk. And the onus of caring for her father is frankly untenable because he's, he's violent, he's verbally abusive, he's patchy. I mean like, if you've ever spoken with anybody with that's in the throes of memory deterioration. It's incredibly upsetting. And just the flip from being the child to the parent is upsetting under the best circumstances. And the way that Dallara experiences and communicates her anger and frustration is in this very controlled register. And I thought that the visuals that Orhan used to get at that at one point she thinks like, maybe I should just put my dad in prison instead of me. Which I was like, brilliant, like amazing, like, yes, go get an Italian lover and have the rest of your days. But I was like, this is something. So that's what stuck with me.
- [14:04]
B
I love this. Cause anger is something that I hadn't really considered before or even picked up on. I noticed her discontentment, I noticed her frustration and her. I love anger in books. I think it's just such an unexplored emotion in general. When did you start sensing that anger? Was it from the start?
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C
Oh God. I mean, even like on page six, it's like, this couldn't have been happening at a worse time. Which is like if you've ever spoken to a heterosexual woman in a marriage, like, you know, that it's like, oh my God, it's World War Three. That sentence alone is like, oh God, it's on. So I think I felt it from the jump. But I also, I think that Dilara also, I mean, she's wracked with so much guilt and frankly like self laceration about her conflicted feelings about her father. There's a lot of ambivalence about the role she's in. And I think she does like, there's a moment that I think will upset anybody where she lets him hurt himself, basically. And the only way to really understand that I think is just the frustration and rage and just, like, trying to have some kind of power in a situation where you feel powerless.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah. I think that feeling of guilt and rage is what made d', Lara, for me, feel like such a dynamic character. Cause there's a way in which you can get a story like this that could feel flat, just like someone's, like, yearning for home, and they're unimpeachable because, like, something bad has happened to them. But she feels so robust and dynamic and like a real person because she is having these complicated, controversial feelings about caretaking, about home. And even she is sometimes, like, it doesn't make sense that I want to be in this prison cell, but I do. I'm. I'm having a revelation. I'm glad that you pointed out.
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C
It's sort of like, it's. I mean, it's the question of, like, the devil. You know, in a way, that's how I always felt when she went back to the prison cell. It's in the same way, like, when you have friends that keep getting back with their ex, except their ex is not Erdogan, but, like, it's just a. It's a comfort. It's familiarity. It's like. It's a way to counter the unknown. I thought it was.
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D
And it's an escape. It's a refuge.
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C
Exactly right.
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D
She gets a break from the increasingly untenable situation with her father, and she can be in this place that, yes, it symbolizes confinement. It symbolizes alienation from society. And yet, for her, it's a refuge. It's a place of freedom, weirdly enough. But then that starts to shift again. She starts to feel guilt in that cell, too, for reasons that we can maybe get into after the spoiler break.
- [16:57]
C
Mj, you've been so patient, and especially, you're the one who, like, really put this book in front of us. So I'm dying to hear your first impressions or, like, kind of when you knew that this was a book.
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B
Well, I am just so happy because, yeah, I read this on a whim, and I was like, I'm gonna talk with people about it. So to hear that people are like, actually, I love this book too. Makes me. It's like a book recommenders, a book club host's dream that this happens. I found this book to be so pleasantly surprising because it does start with that kind of absurdist, deeply entertaining premise. And if it stayed on that level, someone finds a prison cell in their bathroom, I would have been so. But then I felt like I was falling through a series of trapdoors. All of a sudden we're in. We're talking about exile. That's another trapdoor. Now we're talking about Alzheimer's and memory. Then we're talking about sacrifice. These are all deepening elements and they all are such rich, dynamic literary conceits, like, just in general. So I found myself pleasantly surprised because I went in for one thing and I felt like I had discovered this whole world. For me, the thing that I loved was similar to you, Dave, just the duality. I feel like Ouran is playing with a bunch of different contradictions between home and exile, of home and prison. What's a comfort and what's a threat. But then you mentioned the way that whose parent, whose child flips, the way that clinging onto your memory is something that is so urgent and losing your memory is tragic. But at the same time, Dallara, because of nostalgia, is going to this kind of terrible place. So there are no easy answers. There's so much tension thematically in everything that Kanan Orhan is posing. And so I found myself just electrified by the conceit, but then also just jotting a ton of notes down and just a really absorbed in his thinking. And then also I do want to point out that just like the prose itself I found to be so striking, and he has this ability to drop these really remarkable quotes that really stick with you that feel so piercing. So one of them is language is a fickle, feeble pathway when it retreats from us. What means remain for revealing ourselves to others? And another one is, am I less of a person the fewer words I have in my pocket, or am I simply shallower? These are things that like a really spark me as a reader, feeling kind of depressed about existence while also exploring some really fabulous conceits. I call these like Trojan horse books. Zany, top level, really deep interior with a bunch of surprises. And so that's why I was really hooked by this book. So that's me. Those are my thoughts. I want to hear more from you, though. But before we dive into our secondary ideas, our deep dive in, I think we should take a quick break.
- [20:05]
A
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- [21:37]
C
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- [21:38]
A
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- [21:57]
B
And we're back. This is the Book Review. I'm MJ Franklin, I'm with Zumanica, Teeb and Dave Kim, and we're discussing the renovation by Kanan Orhan, which has been our April book club pick. Before we jump back to our conversation in the studio, I just wanted to read off some thoughts from our book club community online. We have up right now an article headline Book Club Read the Renovation by Kanan Orhan with the Book Review and here are a few comments that I love there. Sarah in Syracuse writes that she read the renovation in, quote, one sitting, saying it reflected back to me feelings I had been afraid to admit to my I was drawn to it, yet also worried about the premise that I might feel too familiar, even triggering. And yet the comforts of homes Alara found in the prison became a kind of balm to my grief, helped me embrace having many homes, even if there remains a constant longing for the homeland, for the people we once were. Koc from Singapore writes, I enjoyed the book, which was often hilarious and was deeply touched by Dallara's longing for home, the difficulty of caretaking was so well documented and unromanticized. They didn't like the ending, but then they clarified. Apart from the ending, I found a lot to like in this book, which could also be read as a blueprint for how authoritarianism can quickly destroy a country. Others, though, felt mixed about the novel. Michael in England felt that, quote, it's a short story premise that can't sustain itself over a novel. But then Tara from Brooklyn said, this book kept me on my toes. I enjoyed it very much. At times I was laughing out loud and at others my heart broke for Dilara, her father and her husband's individual journeys. I found it very thought provoking. I'm still thinking about it weeks after finishing. So this is a book that readers are approaching from all different angles. People have a lot of dynamic and different feelings, which I think is important for a book club. Those are just a few responses that I loved. Continue the conversation. But now let's return to our conversation in the studio. So before the break, we were talking about our general top level opinions of the book. Do we like it? Do we hate it? Turns out all of us liked it. However, now I want to pivot and talk about specific ideas that this book made you ponder. Joumana, you mentioned rage. Dave, you mentioned this duality in tone. I've mentioned the duality in ideas of home and existence, memory and all of that other stuff. I'm wondering, are there any other big ideas that you are thinking about as it relates to this book?
- [24:20]
D
It's less about separate things that I'm thinking about or more themes. I think it's the way he is able to connect those very disparate themes that is so interesting. For example, exile, as you mentioned, is a big theme in this book. It's really cool how he connects Exile to memory and to this narrative about Alzheimer's. Because Exile is, on the one hand, a kind of way to preserve yourself, to survive. Because where you're living is no longer livable and so you move. But it's also a kind of erasure and a death. Right? It's a loss of an identity, a past. And I think that link to memory, loss of a person who is gradually losing himself and leaving a past behind really works well. And link that to this prison cell in which you're one person on one side of that threshold and a completely different person on the other. So to me, it's like the connections that. That felt really well done to me and what made that kind of shift in Register's work.
- [25:31]
C
I also loved The. If you take a second to think about why Dallara has this sort of nesting phase when she's in her cell. Right. Cause she brings books and a kettle and a duvet, and, like, she's really trying to make this cell as hospitable as possible. And it's a really striking thing where you're like, I. You could read it as a sort of Stockholm syndrome. You could read it as a sort of. You sort of have to have the wherewithal to be like, I guess I'm gonna make the best of a, like, really weird and completely unexpected situation, which I think is required of people who are in exile, probably on a daily basis.
- [26:09]
B
But then here's the dilemma of the cell, is that it's not that she's just bringing stuff to the cell. The sell is offering her something. Right. She walks in and she hears Turkish. Hears Turkish. A language that she doesn't hear much anymore and that she really misses. Or she feels the wind from the Bosphorus.
- [26:27]
D
Yeah. And the smell of the sea meat. Right. The Turkish bread. Or at least she imagines she does. But I think.
- [26:33]
C
Yeah. I'm less convinced she actually does.
- [26:35]
D
That, I think, is the conceit of the book, is that we never really know what actually is happening.
- [26:40]
C
No. I draw the line at fresh bread, Dave. Like, you lost me.
- [26:44]
D
For me, that's one step too far.
- [26:46]
B
For me, though, the Turkish coffee that she really craves, and it's like, what would you sacrifice for the coffee that you loved but cannot have anymore? That, for me, is the thing that hooked me with this book, that question.
- [26:59]
C
Yeah. Because you can brew Turkish coffee at home. I'm sure they brought their pots. But it's not going to be the same because it's devoid of the ritual of going to the cafe and being able to actually feel the air from the Bosphorus.
- [27:10]
D
My wife brings her coffee to wherever we travel.
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B
Wow.
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C
Amazing.
- [27:15]
D
Yeah.
- [27:16]
C
That's a winner.
- [27:16]
D
That's another.
- [27:17]
B
That's a winner.
- [27:19]
C
She's a winner.
- [27:21]
B
I love this. But, like, those are the connections we have to home that make us feel like we are who we are. Right. So what happens when we lose that? What happens when that. Not just we lose that, but that's taken from us when we're forced away from that. And what will we sacrifice to get it back?
- [27:37]
D
Yeah. And when that home becomes so oppressive and terrifying, we go into this cell that we have started to see as a kind of refuge, as a kind of escape. And then as the prison starts to fill up with prisoners and we start to meet others.
- [27:53]
C
I feel like we're, like, edging towards the spoiler zone, so we should just say spoilers from here on out.
- [27:58]
B
Spoilers from here on out. Now is your moment, if you don't want to know. Actually, before we do that, are there any last things you want to say for our non spoiler listeners?
- [28:05]
C
Make sure you finish it.
- [28:07]
B
Make sure you finish it.
- [28:08]
D
Yeah, that's a good one. Yep.
- [28:11]
B
Well, on that note, we're going to dive into the second half of the book, so I'm gonna just do the reset. Eventually, Dilara's experience of this prison expands. She begins hearing other people in this prison, not just the guard, but other prisoners are brought in. And so she's seeing this prison fill up. She begins befriending some of them. She starts bringing books for another young inmate near her. At one point, she is pulled out of her cell by the guards and is forced into the yard for the day. And that's a big threshold. Like, she has always had her own freedom when she enters the cell. And she's never gone on the other side of this prison, but now she's pulled into this yard. Not that she minds. As her money dwindles, Dilara takes more and more comfort in this prison. And as her father's condition deteriorates, she takes more and more comfort in this prison. And in the end, she finally decides she's gonna build a wall to block off the prison from her home. And she seals herself on the prison side, and that's the end. My question is, what do we make of this ending? What does this do to the consideration of the book? And where does this take us? How do you feel about it?
- [29:24]
C
I think it is a great example of what it can be like to be that homesick and that torn and live a life that feels that divided, which is like she's physically on paper, if we air tagged her, still in Italy, but mentally, emotionally, everything else, she's still in Turkey. And she's actually made it impossible for herself to, like, go back to the Dallara. Like the Italian Dallara.
- [29:54]
D
Yeah. And as oppressive as it has become. Right. Of this place of escape and refuge, that as it fills up with other prisoners and as she starts to meet and hear their stories and hear the horrors that they've gone through, I think it's really interesting that this place is where she chooses to be right. And it's almost like, inevitable. It feels right, yet so surprising.
- [30:21]
C
But so much of Turkey, right before they left, had Begun to feel like a prison, right? I mean, the, like, constant surveillance, the threat. I think the fact that like Ord. I mean, the Dilara's fellow inmates are just women. There's a journalist that comes and. But I mean, these are not rabble rousers. These are real, just average people. And so actually the prison and the population of that prison really begins to resemble what it was last like for her to live there.
- [30:51]
B
Dave, why does it feel right that it ends this way? Or why does it feel inevitable?
- [30:57]
D
I think it feels inevitable. Not in the sense that it's predictable. I did not see it coming per se, same. But after I read it and put the book down, I realized that could be the only way it could end. And not literally. He could have done whatever he wanted. But to me, Dallara, everything was sort of leading to that point in Delara's life, that realization that exile is not actually a complete removal of oneself from the past or from one's home country. And that there is not really. It's not really about escaping or about displacement or physical removal, right? It's, I think, as Jumana pointed out, like her soul, her spirit is still in this place. No matter how much she wants to leave it, no matter how much she wants to reject what it has become, it is her. And so that threshold, that passage between the past and the present, between confinement and freedom, disappears. And I think eventually she realizes that and makes her choice.
- [32:09]
B
Can I read just the last lines of the book? Because I think it gets to. There's a word that I feel is so important, and it was stressed in my reading. The end is all of it was crammed, crammed into the cell. All of the city was in there with me, all of the country. It swirled in a great and terrible form, as if everything I had ever loved and feared had been scooped and thrown into a kaleidoscope. My body was in a cell in Severi prison and it would now never leave. It was the my body. We have seen her for how many pages? 200 pages. Spiritually, mentally stuck in the cell. And now it's my body is there. I feel like that's why it felt inevitable. Like she's present in Italy, but she's not really there. And I feel like. Talk about crossing thresholds in duality. The book seems to be playing with that. What is the threshold of when nostalgia and longing for home becomes a destabilizing thing? She abandons her life and her family. It's a controversial choice. And I feel like, especially knowing that she's left her father behind. And so you're kind of like, whoa, I can't believe she did that at the end. But at the start of the book, you totally are there with her. You're like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that you're missing home. And so the way he kind of crosses back and forth between that threshold and then eventually erases it, I found remarkable.
- [33:30]
D
What did you guys think about the caretaking aspect of this book? There are many scenes of d' Lara caring for her ailing father that I found quite moving, and yet they aren't as emotionally charged as you would expect when a person is in this position of difficulty. And yet, to me, they came off as is very powerful.
- [33:55]
C
There's that observation she has right, where she's looking at her dad and thinking, like, can you hurry up and die so I can start missing you?
- [34:02]
D
Yep.
- [34:03]
C
Oof. Yeah, I. And of course, this is complicated because Dilara was, I think, fairly young when her mother died. So that also adds another dimension to this. Like, she really will be. She'll be without her homeland, without her dad, and that will be like a new phase of life and kind of rootlessness for her.
- [34:26]
B
You mentioned the word guilt earlier when talking about Delara and how she approaches her dad. And I found that to be a really compelling element to this book, because she's trying to take care of her dad. She's literally making space for him. Right. And yet she's so bogged down and beaten down by the situation. And I think anyone who has had to care for someone knows that you love someone and you want to care for them, and you want them to be well, and yet you yourself can be drained, and then you feel guilty for feeling drained, and then you feel guilty for the things that you maybe should have done but just didn't have the capacity for. Like, there's all these what ifs, and there's this demand for more, but, like, you're a person, and I feel like this book captured that really well. And then there's that ultimate decision of, I'm gonna leave my dad behind and I'm gonna go live my separate life. And I think that's gonna be a controversial one.
- [35:22]
D
Yeah, there's that great passage, I think, when she's talking about guilt and the fact that you really have to sort of wall yourself off from this person that you're taking care of to some degree. You have to keep them at arm's length because otherwise you cannot survive. You end up going insane. And yet, I don't Think I feel like we're characterizing her as this cold person who is just, like, totally not caring for her father, because it's not true at all. I think you definitely sense the pain, the anguish, the love that she feels for her father and the great sense of just the many ways she feels connected to him. But at the same time, there is this almost necessity to keep some distance.
- [36:08]
B
And yet I don't want to let her off the hook either. She does pretty neglectful things, including, like, leaving him on the ground, like, in several points, or like, she tripped. Like, she does things that are. Even if you're drained, are bad and you understand them kind of. But, like, you're not totally comfortable with them. And I like that in this book, right? Like, I like that there's always this in this book where it's playing with tensions and dualities. There's always this kind of threshold. So I think that tension is kind of just, like, the heart of this book. I'm really glad that you read this and liked this, but. But the reason why I chose it as a book club book is not because I was like, oh, people are gonna love this, but because I felt like this book gave us so much to chew on, so much to think about, so much to bring to it and that we take away from it. So, yeah, I do think there are
- [37:00]
D
gonna be a fair number of folks, I mean, just the caveat, that are not gonna like it, that are gonna feel it doesn't quite work. And I could understand why. Ultimately, I didn't feel that way. I think he took a great risk in trying in doing that and putting together a book that shouldn't work, but does.
- [37:20]
B
So whether you like it, love it, whether this is your type of book or not, I think read it. I think read it. But before we wrap up here in the studio, before we go, I wanna end, as I always do, with recommendations. I'm curious. What would you recommend readers pick up after they finish their renovation? This could be for whatever reason. Maybe this is another magical realist novel. Maybe this is another book anchored on ideas of home and memory. Maybe it's another set in Turkey and. Or Italy. I defer to you. It could be for whatever reason. But what would you recommend readers pick up next? I'm gonna start with you, Shamana.
- [37:54]
C
I have a couple suggestions. The first one that came to mind is man of Our Time by Dahlia Sofer. I don't know that, like. Dave, you look. You're the reason I read this book. I think you liked this Book a lot.
- [38:05]
D
I did. I loved it.
- [38:06]
C
Yeah, it's really. It was. I sort of have a running list in my mind of books that I think treat Exile appropriately. Like, I just. I've seen so many books, like, dumb it down or just do things that I think are like, I don't know, inappropriate or uncalled for to the experience of Exile.
- [38:26]
B
But that'll be a separate podcast. I'm just running down the list, and
- [38:29]
C
it's going to be three hours long, and it will just be me Jomana,
- [38:33]
B
just crying the whole time.
- [38:37]
C
But this is. I think her sentences are amazing. And, like, the memory for detail that she has. Like, I still remember details from the first pages of that book years after reading it. And basically, it's about a man, an Iranian man, who eventually gets absorbed into be like a cog in the state, which is kind of shocking. And anyway, I think that's great. There's a lot of the same psychological interiority there. So that's man of My Time by Dahlia Sofer. And then I also thought about the Spare Room by Helen Garner, which is an autofictional novel about a narrator caring for a friend who's dying of pretty advanced cancer. And their relationship was already close, but they're able to have a sort of different dimension to it. And it is a novel all about caregiving and the sort of emotional tax that levies.
- [39:30]
B
Helen Garner is a writer that I really want to get into, and I haven't read any of her books. But you wrote about.
- [39:35]
C
Yeah, I love her. I love her. I wrote about her stories last month, and I don't even think her fiction in general is her best work. I think her. Actually, her diaries are the best thing that she's ever written.
- [39:46]
B
What's the book about? There's a grief book, too.
- [39:48]
C
This House of Grief. Yeah, I think that's about a murder trial.
- [39:52]
B
Oh, interesting. I could be wrong. I need to double check this, but I think a friend of the podcast, Anna Dubenco, recommended that to me.
- [39:58]
C
She wants to be like Australian. Janet Malcolm.
- [40:01]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [40:02]
C
Yeah, it is interesting.
- [40:03]
B
Talk about a hook. I'm in.
- [40:06]
C
Yeah. Janet Malcolm from Down Under. Nobody's ever said that before.
- [40:10]
B
What about you, Dave?
- [40:12]
D
I would. I mentioned Kafka earlier, and so I'll just sort of take the easy way and recommend Kafka, who I'm sure he.
- [40:21]
B
Kafka is the easy way. Said no one ever.
- [40:23]
C
The Dave Kim story.
- [40:26]
D
I meant the easy answer to the question. But, yes, it's not quite the easy way. But I think any book of his, I think, would resemble the kind of things that Orhan is trying to do. The Trial probably being a good one to pair with this. That's about a man called Joseph Kay who goes through the sort of ridiculous legal system and has no idea why he's on trial or why he's been or what crime he's been accused of. But also, there's a Turkish writer named Oguz Attay.
- [40:58]
C
Yes, that reissue came out, right?
- [41:01]
D
Yeah. He writes these sort of slightly surreal narratives that also work in absurdities that are meant to highlight some fear or paranoia. And I think he's best known for a novel called the Disconnected. But there was just a reissue of a story collection called Waiting for the Fear that I really liked very much about paranoia and alienation from society. And you should pick up.
- [41:27]
B
I don't know this writer or this book. So I'm excited to discover more.
- [41:30]
D
Yeah, Gris, great.
- [41:31]
C
What about you, mj?
- [41:32]
B
I have so many. I'm sorry in advance. The main one that I wanted to recommend is the Anthropologist by Aishagul Shavas. This is a very different book from this one. There's no magical realist plot in the Anthropologist. There's barely a plot at all. But it's so good, I actually reviewed it for the Book Review a few years ago. It's about two people, Aisha and Manu, who is this couple that's been living in a foreign city for a few years. And at the start of the book, two things happen. One is Isia decides that she is gonna work on a documentary about a local park. And then the couple overall decides that they are gonna buy a home in this new adopted city. And that's the book. It's about them living their lives under as they navigate, looking at apartments and looking at homes as they. As Isia tries to film this park. But the reason why I love it and the reason why I would pair it with a renovation is because I think it's. It similarly probes ideas of home. What makes us feel settled in the renovation. Dilara's grasping on things like the air or the taste of her favorite coffee she really misses. These are things that, for her, make a life a home that she'd sacrifice so much for. And in the Anthropologist, it's. The narrator is trying to discover that in their new home. They're trying to figure out, like, how do I capture what it feels like to live here? How do I capture the allure of this park? How do I be a good neighbor? There's something about the fixation on the mundane details that make a life that I love exploring in literature that I think both books explore in different ways. So I have that and then can I do a lightning round and just flash through a few titles? First is what We can know by Ian McEwan, which I think also dynamically plays with like, memory and there's an Alzheimer's plot, but it explores questions of like, how do we remember the past, what do we lose when we lose the past, et cetera. Exit west by Mohsin Hamed. I can't believe we haven't mentioned that before, but I think that's another magical realist. Exile, Emigration, Doors as portals. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It's this dystopian world where like slowly but surely words are being lost, items are being lost, memories are being erased. And you follow a narrator who's trying to help someone maintain. I think her editor was like hiding in her attic. Maintain memories, words, all that stuff. And then last but not least, I wanted to mention We Do Not Part by Hong Gong. That was another book club pick. It's one of my all time favorites. It's very different, but also talking about like the necessity of remembering the past. So those are a bunch that I would recommend.
- [44:12]
C
A veritable font MJ with those recommendations
- [44:16]
B
that's unfortunately all the time we have today. Dave Jumana, thank you so much for this great conversation. Thank you for reading this book.
- [44:22]
D
Thank you, thank you for recommending it.
- [44:24]
B
Yeah. Also, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who read with us this month. This has been really fun. And as promised, the title of our May in May, the Book Review Book Club will be reading Transcription by Ben Lerner. It's a slim but mighty book about technology, truth, family, existence, all that good stuff. We will be talking about the book on the podcast that airs on May 29, and we'll be talking about the book online too. Right now we have up an article headlined Book Club Read Transcription by Ben Lerner with the Book Review. Join the conversation there. And until next time, happy reading.
- [45:02]
D
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- [45:29]
B
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