Bloomsbury
Review by David Starkey
The themes in Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş’s new story collection, Long Distance, are easy to identify: displacement, disillusionment, disquiet. Things don’t go the way we’d planned, Savaş constantly reminds us, even when, like so many of the characters in the book, we manage to break free of our familiar and deadening surroundings. The elations and tribulations of the expatriate come naturally to Savaş. “My family started moving—cities, countries—when I was very young,” she says in an interview with Brooklyn Rail. “We changed locations every few years, which is why the sense of temporality is a more natural state for me than that of a native or a ‘rooted’ immigrant.” This rootlessness results in a fictional milieu where miscommunication is the norm. Like old-fashioned long-distance phone calls, the messages the characters in Long Distance attempt to leave for one another are garbled and sometimes lost altogether.
In the title story, we find Lea, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at a university in Rome, waiting for a visit from Leo, an old flame from California. Naturally, things go awry. After his arrival, Leo initially avoids a sexual encounter with Lea, who “thought with frustration about her smooth, soft legs, her lace underwear, now wasted.” By the end of his stay, Lea reckons that “the scales tipped more toward success than disappointment,” but the story ends on a note of simmering frustration.
In “Layover,” Lara and Selin, two old friends from Istanbul, meet during Selin’s layover in Paris, where Lara now teaches. The story is told from Lara’s perspective, and it’s only gradually that we realize what jerk she is, and how forbearing Selin has been throughout their friendship. Lara, though, is unenlightened by their encounter, slipping right back into her dreary life once her friend is gone: “Perhaps she should cancel her class after all. She might go home and read. She could always go back to the café for lunch.”
My favorite story is “We Are Here,” about a group of study abroad students at a university in an unnamed and unlovely Russian city. The narrator, who tells us that her host “swept my name aside and called me Masha,” is not unlike Lara in “Layover.” She’s good at justifying her own subtle betrayals and blaming others for her loneliness and boredom. And yet Masha, like Lara, isn’t an entirely bad person—just flawed and unlikeable.
There’s a lot of local color in these stories, but place itself isn’t always specifically identified. In the Brooklyn Rail interview, Savaş explains her propensity for writing about “unnamed cities or characters of unspecified origin—this is not necessarily to accentuate their marginality but rather to allow them freedom, without being constrained to a single nationality or geography.” And so in “The Guest,” the first person narrator tells us the story of leaving his own nameless country to attend the wedding of the sister of his girlfriend in another unspecified country. Surely, the two places are the United States and Turkey, but because they are unidentified in the story, there’s a sense that the characters are living in a realm closer to fable than realistic fiction.
The effect of all this dislocation can be a bit overwhelming at times, not to mention discouraging: it is really, really difficult it is to merge successfully with people from another culture these stories remind us time and again. But Savaş is a superb writer, both on the level of the sentence and as a designer of plot: there’s just enough incident in each story to make you feel that something has happened, even if you might be hard pressed to name what that something was.
Inevitably, not every story will resonate with every reader. “Cry It Out,” for instance, begins: “For a long time, all we talked about was the baby’s sleep.” And, indeed, the next eighteen pages dwell on that very topic, one new parents would no doubt find fascinating; old parents possibly not so much. Still, if Ayşegül Savaş is currently generating the sort of buzz that makes other writers jealous—just take a look at the reviews of last year’s novel The Anthropologists—the thirteen stories in Long Distance make it clear that she deserves those kudos.
