Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Renovation,' by Kenan Orhan

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At NY Times.com/gift. 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 Kenan Orhan.

The renovation is a bold and vicious 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 I could see it, 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. 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, Jumana Cateave, hi, Jumana. Hi, I'm Jay. You are a fan favorite of your last week talking about on the calculation of volume. 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. I'm so excited to dive in more, and also with us is Dave Kim, hi, David. Hello, I'm stoked to be here, I'm Jay, thank you for inviting me. 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 tragic? No, was it Adam Ross? No, that was at the beginning. It was.

It was. Yeah. Yeah, my sense of time is completely off. We just let Dave out of prison. That's right.

“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

that's making new book readers are still discovering it. We don't want to put off anyone who doesn't want to be spoiled. So the first half of this conversation will be spoiler free. We'll talk about setup stuff, we'll talk about opinions, ideas, and themes, all of 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. Number two is at the end of the episode, we will reveal our May book book 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. Jumana, can you set the table and tell us? What is this book? What is the renovation? Oh boy, oh boy, I'm so excited.

Okay, so even just from the shortest of summaries, I knew I was going to like this book, because the concede is crazy. So we are in Italy. We are in this sort of rather cramped apartment occupied by Dilara and her husband, who are 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 Dilara 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 were finished. Dilara's been very good about resisting the urge to look under the tarp, while their renovation has been going on. Well, she tries to peek and they're like, no, and they put up the tarp. Thank you, Dilara, right?

She's like, okay, really. Right, she got it. So 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 on Istanbul, the delivery 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.

From the opening line, the opening line is just, I don't know by what accident the builder's managed it, but instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom, they had installed a prison cell. It's so good, it reminds me of a line from in the loop where they're making fun of builders

who had done something wrong, and their like, builders are never the heroes of a story because

their builders, I can't do the Scottish broke, 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 Delara.

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. I would only add two other things, one quick one is that part of the animated tension is that Delara finds herself really drawn to this literal prison because she's 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, and the book is split into many parts, but toward the beginning her husband runs away, and so all of the 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 this prison cell, and so that's part of the animating tension.

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. It almost becomes like in her home, like a quiet room, a quiet room for her, a retreat, which is crazy. I mean, room, but the meat happens to be like an infamous prison, Davis or anything that you would add.

Yeah, that it's actually in the prison. It's not just the prison cell designed to look like a prison cell in, that's a great delivery. It's actually a portal that takes her to the delivery prison and is a cell in a woman's block there. 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.

“Well, and one of the guards, 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 the space, so like basically the government is taking, 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. 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, brought this speaking,

how do you feel about this book? Give me a vibe check, love this book, hate this book, what did you make you think about? Tell me your thoughts. 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, a service 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 that 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, recentish events in Turkey, going back to the Erbspring 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, 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. That breaks like the first rule of allegory, which is, you don't explain what it is or how it's realizing, right? You don't name, you certainly don't name the problem, right? You don't invoke Erdogan's name. There's a podcast I love 99% invisible, and they

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. Exactly. It's like telling your punchline as you're telling the joke, it undercuts the whole purpose of the allegory, and it works here, you say it. 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 fine, I'll accept that this is a weird world, and which portals just open up. Fine, but then we're back in a kind of very 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 Delara is flipping between these two realities. What makes it work? 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 complimentary and start to blur into one another, and blur into each other. Part of why that works so well is because

the reality of living under air to one, when you can be like a former professor in your 70s, sort of writing, and thinking about politics, and yet be the subject of beforest to flee, because you're considered a danger to the state. It's like when we meet Delara's father, he can hardly 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, yet still missing home, even though you had to leave under those circumstances. So that the real becomes the absurd, and the absurd becomes the real, and I think he does that really well. What about Yujimara? What did you think about this speaking, and what did you focus on or think about? I really clocked Delara's rage. To me, this is a book about like,

profound anger, 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

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 Delara 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. I mean, like, yes, go get

“an Italian lover and have a rest of your days, but I was like, this is something, so that's what's”

stuck with me. I love this, because 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 yearning. 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? Oh my god. I mean, even 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 this like, oh my god, it's World War III. 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 Delara also, I mean, she's racked with so much guilt and frankly, like self-lasteration 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,

trying to have some kind of power in a situation where you feel powerless. Yeah, I think that feeling

of guilt and rage is what made Delara for me feel like such a dynamic character, because there's a way in which you can get a story like this, like, could feel flat, just like, so much like, you're ining for home, and they're unimpeachable because, like, something bad has happened to that, 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, sometimes,

like, it doesn't make sense that I'm going to be on this prison cell, but I do. I'm having a revelation. I'm glad that you pointed out. It's sort of like, it's, I mean, it's the question of,

“like, the devil, you know, you know, that's how I always felt when she went back to the prison cell.”

It's in the same way, like, when you're friends that keep getting back with their acts, except

their acts is not air to one, 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, and it's an escape. It's a refuge, right? She gets a break from the increasingly untenable situation with her father, and she can be in this place that, yes, 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. MJ, you've been so patient, 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? Well, I am just so happy because, yeah, I read this one a whim, and I was like,

I'm going to talk with people about it. So to hear that people are like, actually, I love this book, too. It makes me, it's like, a book recommender is a book club host dream at 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 had been so happy, but then I feel like I was falling through a series of trap doors. All of a

sudden, we're in, we're talking about exile. Let's, another trap door. Now we're talking about all timers and memory, then we're talking about sacrifice. These are all deepening elements, and they all are such rich dynamic literary conceits, like, in 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

Iran 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, to Lara, because of nostalgia, is going to this kind of terrible place. So there's no easy answers. There's so much tension, thematically, everything that

Known Iran is posing. And so I found myself, like, just, like, electrified by the conceit, but then also just jotting a ton of notes down and just 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 languages 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 with fewer words I have in my pocket, or am I simply shallower? These are things that like really spark me as a reader feeling kind of depressed about existence, while also exploring some really fabulous conceits. I call these like Trojan Horsebooks, Zany Top Level, really deep interior with

“some 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. Did you know that India is the biggest adopter of crypto globally? And that Estonia offers online voting in all its elections. I'm Catherine Benholt, host of The World, a new daily newsletter from

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And we're back. This is the book review. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm with a G-monica team, and Dave Kim, and we're discussing the renovation by Conon Oron, 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 Conon Oron with the book review and hear a few comments they love there. Sarah and 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 myself. I was drawn to it, yet also worried about the premise that I might feel too familiar, even triggering." And yet,

the comfort to poem to Lara found in the present became a kind of bomb to my grief. Help me embrace having many homes, even if it remains a constant longing for the home land for the people we want to wear. K.O.C. from Singapore writes, "I enjoyed the book, which was often hilarious and was deeply touched by Delara's longing for home. The difficulty of caretaking was so well documented and unromanticized. They didn't want 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 and England felt that, quote, "It's a short story premise that can't sustain itself over a novel." But then, Terra from Brooklyn said, "This book got me on my toes. I enjoyed it very much. At times,

I was laughing out loud and others my heart broke for Delara, 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 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 at this book made you ponder. Do you monitor your mentioned rage? Dave, you mentioned this duality and tone. I've mentioned the duality and 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? 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. You move, but it's also a kind of erasure in a death. It's a loss of an identity

“of 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 felt really well done to me and what made that kind

of shift in registers work. I also loved the, if you take a second to think about why Delara

has this sort of nesting phase when she's in her cell, right? Because she brings books in a cattle and a duvet and she's really trying to make this cell as hospitable as possible and it's a really striking thing where you're like, 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 wear with all to be like, I guess I'm going to make the best of a really weird and a completely unexpected situation,

“which I think is required of people who are in exile probably on a daily basis.”

But then here's the dilemma of the cell is that she's just bringing stuff to the cell. The cell

a language that she doesn't hear much anymore and then she really misses or she feels the wind

from the boss for us. Yeah, the smell of the cement, right? The bread, the Turkish bread and and or at least she imagines she does. But yeah, I'm less convinced she actually does.

“That I think is the conceit of the book is that we never really know what, what actually is happening.”

No, I draw the line at fresh bread days like that. You lost me for me. That's one step too far. For me, though, it's that 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. 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 boss for us. And my wife brings her coffee to wherever

we travel. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, that's a winner. That's another. I don't win her.

She's a winner. 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. We're more forced away from that and what will we sacrifice to get it back? Yeah. And when that home becomes so oppressive and terrifying, we go into the 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. I feel like we're like edging towards the spoilers on. So we should just say 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? Make sure you finish it. Make sure you finish it. Yeah. That's a good one, yeah. Well, on that note, we're going to dive into the second half of the book.

So I'm going to just do the reset. Eventually, Delara's experience of this prison expands. She begins hearing other people in this prison, not just the guard, but other prisoners are brought in. So she's seeing this prison fill up. She begins befriending some of them. She starts bringing books for another young. Inmate near her. 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, Duendo's Delara 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 going to 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? 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 Delara, like the Italian Delara. Yeah, and as oppressive as it has become right up 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. But so much of Turkey right before they left had begun to feel

“like a prison, right? I mean, the, like, constants surveillance, the threat. I think the fact that like”

ordinary, I mean, the Delara'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. Dave, why does it feel right that it ends this way? Or why does it feel inevitable? 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, when put the book down, I realized that could be the only way it could end. And not literally, it can, he could have done whatever he wanted. But to me,

exile is not actually a complete removal of oneself from the past or from one's own country. And that

there is not really, it's not really about escaping or about displacement or physical removal.

“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, 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. Could 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 stressing 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's wrote in a great and terrible form. As if everything I had ever loved and feared, I've been scooped out of me and thrown into a

kaleidoscope. My body was in a cell and severely present 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. She's present and Italy, but she's not”

really there. And I feel like talking about crossing threshold and 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 in her family. It's a controversial choice and I feel like especially knowing that she's left her father behind. 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. Like, oh yeah,

I make 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. What did you guys think about the caretaking aspect of this book? There are many scenes of Dalarah caring for her ailing father that I found quite moving and yet they aren't as emotionally charges you would expect when a person

is in this position of difficulty. And yet to me they came off as a very powerful.

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? Yeah. And of course this is complicated because Dalarah 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 reallessness for her. You mentioned the

word guilt earlier when talking about Dalarah and how is she approaches her dad? And I found about 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 the demand for more but like you're a person and I feel like this book capture that really well and then there's that ultimate decision of I'm gonna leave my dad behind and I'm gonna live my separate life and I think that's gonna be a controversial one. 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 arms length because otherwise we cannot survive you end up going insane and I 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 there is this almost necessity to to keep some

distance and yeah 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 like she tricked like she does

not totally comfortable with them and I like that in this book right like I like that there is always

this in this book where I was playing with tensions and duality is this 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 like this but the reason why I chose it as a book club book it's 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 going to be a fair number of folks I mean just the caveat that aren't are not going to like it that are going to feel it doesn't quite work and I would 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 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 want to end

as I always do with recommendations I'm curious what would you recommend readers pick up after

they finish the 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 book 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 must start with you Shimano I have a couple suggestions the first one that came to mind is man of our time by Dalia so far like Dave Dave you look you're the reason I

“read this book I think you like this book a lot yeah it's really it's 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 I'm calling for it to the experience of exile but let me sever back as I'm just running on the list and it's gonna be three hours long and it's it will just be me but this is I think

her senses are amazing and like the memory for detail that she has like I still remember

details from the first page of that book years after reading it and basically it's about a man an Iranian man who eventually gets absorbed in to 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 Dalia so fair 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 levees Helen Garner's a writer that I really want to get into and I haven't read any of her book but you wrote about 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 what's the book about there's a grief book”

this house of grief yeah I think that's it that's about a murder trial oh interesting I could be wrong I needed double-check this but I think a friend of the podcast and a debate go recommended that to me she wants to be like Australian Janet Malcolm interesting yeah it is interesting talk about a hook I'm in yeah Janet Malcolm from Down Under nobody's ever said that before what about you Dave I would I mentioned Kafka earlier and so

I'll just sort of take the easy way and recommend Kafka I like that because the easy way is that you know one ever the Dave Kim story I'm not 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 to pair with this that's about a man called the Joseph K who goes through the sort of ridiculous legal

system and has no idea why he's on trial or why he's been in or what crime he's been accused of but also there's a Turkish writer named Oghu's Atai yes that reassure came out right 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 reassure of a store collection called waiting for the fear that I really liked

this right or this book so I'm excited to discover more yeah grease great what about you MJ I have

so many I'm sorry it depends the main one that I want to recommend is the anthropologist by Ishagol Shavas this is a very different book from this one there's no magical realist plot and 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 isia and man who is this couple that's been living on the foreign city for a few years and at the start of the book two things happen one is

isia decides that she is going to work on a documentary about a local park and then the couple

overall decides that they are going to 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

“look parrot with the renovation is because I think it similarly prods ideas of home what makes”

us feel settled in the renovation delara'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 throughout 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 ellor 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

“a literature that I think both books explore in different ways so I have that and then kind of”

do a lightning run just flash through a few titles first is what we can know by e&mqn which I think

also dynamically play it's like memory and there's all the timers plot but it explores questions like what do you how do you remember the past what to be losing we lose the past etc exit west by most in home it 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 akawa it's about 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 or I think her editor”

it was like hiding in the her attic maintain memories words all that stuff and then last but not least I wanted to mention we do not part by hung on 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 a veritable font empty with those recommendations that's unfortunately all the time we have today day of jemana thank you so much for this

great conversation thank you for reading this book and thank you for recommending it yeah also I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who read with us this month this isn't really fun and as promised the title of our may book in may the book review book club will be reading transcription by ben learner 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 errors on may 29

and we'll be talking about the book on mine too right now we have up an article headline book club re-transcription by ben learner with the book review join the conversation there and until next time happy reading