This holiday week I’ve been reading many noteworthy, poignant and funny (still waiting for Elisa Gabbert’s!!!) 2024 reading lists by my favourite writers on Substack. I, too, read many books this year, and as I sat down to browse through my list of 22-25 odd titles, one of them jumped out of the queue, the rut, the circle. A delicious juicy, flavorful, and small-ly powerful novella, this book held a hold on me as I was set to embark on a similar trajectory in my life. The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş at the word-, sentence-, paragraph-level was so powerful. Making me want to turn the page and also simultaneously mourn the fact that soon this book will be over. In the atomic year that 2024 was, each paragraph in The Anthropologists ceased its power over me, holding its own captive juice. The writing never bored me, as I’m sure it didn’t the writer.

These are broadly Asya’s meditations on the routine of the everyday in the lives of Manu and her in a nameless European city as a professor and documentary filmmaker, respectively. These fragments of Asya’s thoughts echo our general sense of detachment from the immediate world around, from her job, from herself. Manu is also reserved. But they are in love. With each other, their lives and the city. In a world plagued by wars, the climate crisis and a general sense of degradation all around, Savaş infuses the lives of Manu and Asya with a sense of otherworldy simplicity.