The slow and leisurely rot of a day

The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane?

Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.

The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, concerns itself with two people having a relationship in a language that is not either of their own, in the city they each independently chose to exile themselves to. 

Where?, I wonder, and I make assumptions. At some point it becomes clear that their shared tongue is not English. I make a game of guessing the language and city; for a minute I imagine them living in a neighbourhood just north of me. (But it's not Montreal, it turns out; rather, Paris, and I realize I haven't been in a very long time, and I want to go.)

It makes me nostalgic, remembering what it is to make a life for oneself, by oneself, away from one's family, and then together with someone else, and the life you make with the people you choose to be your family. 

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.

He found them at flea markets and on the street, always with an idea of ways he would put them to use, though he never did. His true passion was collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.

It makes me more generally nostalgic for youth, for having to make do, for carefully choosing one's indulgences. For deciding what kind of person one wants to be, living in that neighbourhood, having those things, knowing these people.

After a day of hanging out in the park:

I love a good day of rotting, Ravi said,
That's what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.

Those are the best days. "I knew little beyond the fact that I wanted to film daily life." (Remarkably, I am soon thereafter reading Pond, which is nothing but daily life. If there is a theme to my reading this year it might be this, the mundane.)

It's a little bit about living outside of oneself, like all writers do, while looking on usually kindly, and at least honestly. The Anthropologists charmed me.

We sensed smugness in the foreigners' repeated disclaimer that they were doing work on themselves, as if the psyche were a house for remodeling, its parts identifiable as rooms and walls and beams, its leaks and fissures possible to fix. And it seemed there was always a limit to how genuinely we would be able to know them, because the constant calibration of their own well-being wouldn't allow true intimacy.

I discovered this novel when it showed up on Barack Obama's list of 2024 favourites, and I read it in February 2025.

Excerpts 
Future Selves (published as a short story) 
Daily Life 
Anthropology  

Review
Everyday Magic (Massachusetts Review): "preserves time and room to make art out of daily life, not just survive it."

Also:

Her dedication to the “infraordinary” has evocations of Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and of writer and teacher George Perec who, in Attention to What? (1973), urges us to found our own anthropology by questioning “our teaspoons”.

(Note to self: Elkin again. Look this up.)