Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm delighted to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, Michael is in conversation with Turkish born Paris based writer I Shagl Chavas. As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
So Michael, the title of this episode is nothing happens in I shouldgle Chavas's book, and that's great, But as a reader who loves a good plot, tell me why it is a good thing that nothing happens in this book.
Yes, Look, that title is tending to be slightly cheeky or the very least self parodic, because what I know about myself is I am an absolute whore for narrative and like I love a good plot. I like a crime novel or a thriller. I like fick over nonfiction. I want a story that drags me along and is gripping and page turning, and where that's kind of front and center to what's going on. But I'm also a bit of an eclectic reader. So occasionally what you want
is a book that doesn't do that. It doesn't tick those boxes. Instead, what it does is give you world building and character and beautiful prose on the line where part of the point of the exercise is luxuriating in the author and their voice rather than turning the page to see what happens next. And as far as books like that go, The Anthropologist by Aishagl Savage is a prime example.
Okay, I think you've definitely got me interested. Tell me a bit more about the Anthropologists.
I need to be very clear, it's hyperbole to say that this is a book about nothing. It's a book about a relationship a couple called Asia and Manu, and they're hunting for a new apartment to buy. The city therein isn't named. They're both foreigners to that city, so they've got a particularly tight kind of unit between the two of them. But that's more or less the entire book.
They go, they see apartments, then they sit in cafes and do post mortems about what they liked, what they didn't like, the kind of imagined future that they could have in an apartment like that, and that's kind of the whole thing. There's no conflict, there's no false drama.
There's just these two people who love each other and they're day in miniature, and there's something beautiful about that, the immediacy, because it's a reflection not just of a book where plot isn't front and center, but it's also a reflection of that time in your early twenties where you've got adult freedoms but maybe not the full weight of adult responsibilities. And so they're luxuriating impossibility and just in what's in front of them day by day, and there's something kind of delicious.
About it coming up in just a moment. Nothing happens in Asha Gulshavas's book, and that's great.
Tell me a little bit about a moment when it became clear to you that Future Selves, which is such a wonderful story but is in many ways the genesis of this novel. What was the moment when you got a sense that Future Selves could be expanded outwards or could kind of encompass a different, broader set of concerns.
I wrote Future Selves during the pandemic, and that, you know, the way that people's lives were going in so many extreme directions, and you could really see disparity when when people had to be confined, had to go to work or had to stop work, were completely alone, or weren't community, those extremes became so apparent. And that's when I wrote the story about a couple who is looking for an apartment to buy and a young boy who has a
tragic ending. And when the story was published, I was a little bit by the feedback I got by how many people had connected to it, and I thought, oh, like, maybe there is something here, and I was quite heartened. And I also thought there is something so liberating about the framework of looking for an apartment to buy. I could sort of continue writing this for a really long time, the story of the boy and the tragedy that befalls him.
I thought, you know, it's too finite, it's too soon, and that can't really define the novel, or that it will not lead the story further. So I had to get rid of it, and so I was left with just this apartment hunt and I started expanding from there.
And also something else that happened at the same time, which was because we weren't going out, and because we weren't seeing friends or eating in restaurants, daily life started appearing as something very exotic, and it's you know, some people ask like, oh, it's so courageous that you wrote about daily life, or you know, you can see it so crisply, But actually I wasn't. I was removed from it,
and that's why I was able to write it. And I thought, wouldn't it be so fun to write a book in which characters are going to cafes and hanging out and having drinks.
That does make a lot of sense, that it's wild fantasy that they could experience these basic, mandane things that we take for granted and the rest of the time. Yes, in us here a manner, you have possibly one of the happier couples committed to the literary page in a long time. And I want to know, is that kind of wish fulfillment as well? Is that just kind of Was that a deliberate choice to have them be so harmonious?
It really was, And this was the number one greatest challenge and obstacle for the book. When I knew what the structure was and that what the novel was going to be, I said, Okay, this is a book about a couple who love one another, and that's sort of it. And again, you know this, it's within the framework of early youth, so they don't have that many reasons for arguments.
I'm sure Manu and Asia, when they have children or when their parents get sick, they will start getting into arguments, but it's this time in their life that's totally idyllic. And at the same time, for some reason, you are not allowed happy couples in literature, even though it's the thing. I know people who are happy. I know lots of young couples who love one another and that's sort of it, and they have silly arguments but nothing existential, And I thought,
why can't that be the basis of the book? And it kept on becoming a problem with editors who wanted drama, who wanted who said like, oh, you know, how nice that this is the background, but surely now we need some big plot development. And they get separated and then they come back together, and I say, but no, that you know, life doesn't always work that way, and people can continue peacefully loving one another and seeing these apartments and the thing is that they don't have that much
at stake with the apartments hunt. I think that's why they're not arguing. They're like, ah, well, we can still continue living in our rented place. And they really are children.
You say, not that much at stake, But seriously, if you put in a chapter where they go to Ikea to get some furniture, then they'd be broken up by the end of the book.
It's very sty they're not buying furniture. They you know, they buy things from the flea market, so it's probably very cheap and they don't have to assemble it. And again, it doesn't feel like a big commitment when they buy it from the free markets, so there are no arguments acquire right.
The introduction of an Alan cab would just main kind of conflict avoid I am. I do think there's something too in the point you make about how old they are. You know, part of this period in their life. Part of what you're capturing is that period where adult capacity has arrived, but adult responsibility is just around the corner. That it's a period where you're kind of in a bit of a bubble, right, and it's.
It's such a short period and it's so it's full of freedom and joy and hypothetical conversations and getting drunk and you know, smoking joints, And I thought, what a fun time to try and capture. And I guess I was also writing it at a time when I was about to cross to the other side of real adult responsibility, and that that time of being youthful adults started feeling quite exotic to me as well.
It is funny because the book resists nostalgia about family tradition, that resists nostalgia about homelands or about whatever those concepts mean. But it is an intensely nostalgic book for the period that it describes, for the lifestyle that it kind of demonstrates as possible. And I think that gives it a kind of lovely, almost a note of melancholy to my mind. But maybe that's what happens when you read it in your forty six and this kind of freedom is far
behind you. But it did seem to me to be a kind of captule of a particular kind of hope. You know. The idea of having a day where you wrote together is such a kind of beautiful concept, I think.
Yes, And it's only in that phase and it sort of vanishes forever and perhaps then comes back when you're quite old and have abandoned certain worldly responsibilities once again. You know, within that space of freedom or hope or possibility, there is also this constant anxiety, right And when you're in the period of rotting and hanging out, you're also asking yourself, Oh, should I be acting a bit more adults?
Should I be looking into mortgages, or you know, not drinking as much and going out for a run in the morning, all of these things. And this is some of a question I get asked a lot by young people during readings, what would you suggest we do in this time of our lives, because we also think we should be committing and figuring out what to do. And I and I tell them just enjoy it, just relax. You know, you are going to have responsibility so soon you don't even have to decide or like, go take
that path. I love the rotting.
Yeah, oh no, The only thing to do is do nothing, embrace it, be in it. Then how does that connect with us HER's work as a documentary filmmaker. How does the person who is the observer, who is the chronic, who is the anthropologist, are they ever truly in the moment. I mean, she feels like she is, but how much is there a necessary arms length from the person who's studying everything that happens around us.
He is a pretty anxious person. So as as much as she feels nostalgic for that period of rotting and nostalgic or very warmly towards this moment of youth, she is also very anxious. And she is an observer, and she's always going to be distancing herself or taking a step back from these moments of pure pleasure and saying, Okay, what are we doing here and what does it mean?
And I think it's with that type of anxiety that she embarks on the documentary project because she's very curious about how other people live and you know, what are things that they do that maybe she and Manu aren't doing? An how do people give shape and meaning to their daily lives? And I think the documentary sort of mimics her quest in life to you know, to give shape, to give meaning, to have some sort of a reason to account for the hours of rotting or going to the park or taking a walk.
You also capture the ways in which in a relationship we all become anthropologists, that the thing about the two of them is great rehashes of the things that go on in their lives. That they not only go and look at these apartments, but then they will sit in a cafe afterwards endlessly kind of rehearsing the stories that
they're going to tell about it. That part of what makes any partnership, any relationship, really, but a romantic union in particular, is that business of post mortems on everyone and everything around you all times.
Yes, and that's their form of intimacy. I think that's sort of their own private ritual and culture. Also, I think rehashing is especially important for us in Mono because there are so few symbolic or invisible structures that are keeping them together. No religion, you know, no ceremonies. So the rehashing is a ceremony of its own. It's a way of repeating and therefore making solid the narratives that they come up.
With when we return, I should go. Shares the approach behind writing the Anthropologists what she calls a fragmentary style, and she explains why she wants to make foreignness the status quality in her rite, We'll be right back. You show extraordinary deadness in this novel as a kind of miniaturist, creating these really small moments that absolutely sing that their
smallness and their clarity is kind of the point. That conflict between characters would overshadow that, and geographical detail would overshadow that, and by stripping all of that away, the very small seems to be your project here.
Yes, And the fragmentary approach started because I wanted to get away from the short story and rewire my brain, so I wasn't thinking in the tone of the story. But as I kept breaking it down and giving titles to each of the episodes, I thought, oh, well, this is actually you know, this is the point of the book. It's a point about daily life, and daily life does happen.
It is about the small. And you know, you can't write about daily life in a in an epic structure or as a family saga, because it would become a farce. You know, if I created a traditional novel arc around having coffee and meeting up with friends, it just wouldn't work. So the episodic also rescued me because it showed me a way to write about daily life and to honor daily life, you know, without maybe tiring the reader or trying their patients.
I'm interested in the decision not to ground the anthropologists in a specific physical place or a specific cultural tradition. You know, the city goes Um named, Your characters' backgrounds referred to elliptically rather than with any specificity. How important was it to you that there was that distance from the grounded in that level of the narrative.
I thought so much about this, and I thought, you know, it is an autobiographical book. It's most more autobiographical than anything I've written. Why not sort of own up to its inspirations. Why not say it's a Turk living in Paris and she's married to a Latvian And I would try it out and it would be okay. But there was something lost which I couldn't quite name, but instinctively I knew that that's not what I wanted to do
in the book. And I think what was lost was a universality, This sense of a foreign experience or a sense of youthful estrangement that I was trying to get to, that exists everywhere. And it's not just you know, expats who feel it. It's also people you know who move from one city to another in their own countries, or maybe it's people in their own cities who feel a stranger,
who feel foreign just because they're a little quirky. And I thought the book is more about that than it is about the specific life of a Turk living in Paris, which is, you know, that comes with a lot of history, it comes with a certain you know, it comes with stereotypes, that comes with different expectations. And I didn't want to be writing that, but it's something I do quite often actually in my stories in my previous book as well, that I'll try to blur the lines of geographical settings
and people's backgrounds. And I think, again, this might be my autobiographical instinct, that I don't define myself simply as a Turk, or simply as a Turk living in France, or simply as a Turk who's also bilingual. There are so many aspects to my identity. But I think to everyone's identity that it feels restricting to have to pick geography and then to to write within the prejudices or the expectations of that geography.
I think you write about foreignness and the experience of being a foreigner in ways that are different to any that I remember reading before. And I would love it if you would reflect on what the concept of the foreign means to you.
I have a short story collection coming out in a few months and I was doing an interview for it, and the interviewer asked me, are there any things that surprised you about the themes in this book? And you know, it's so interesting that, you know, I write about people in foreign places all the time, and then when I put the collection together, I thought, oh, everyone is a foreigner. How interesting that I gie born using this trope. And
I almost think that it comes to me. You know, if you're a writer who always writes about characters in their homeland, it's sort of like the neutral state. No one will question you. You know, no one will say, oh, you keep writing about Americans. It's just, you know, that's sort of the basis. It is the foundation. And I think for me, foreignness is almost like a form of belonging,
and it's probably through that. You know, that's my neutral state, and that's where I start from, and you know, obviously from my autobiography, because I grew up in so many different places and I belong to different linguistic traditions and possibly in my writing, I'm trying to make foreigness something that is the status quo.
I think you do it so effectively. And I'm glad you made that point about foreigness as a state of belonging, because I think that's where for me, the great difference in the way you approach it presents itself that instead of this idea of alienation of the other, or distancing your characters the characters who define themselves by their foreigness, rather than in opposition to it.
Right exactly. And I think you know, when when I was growing up and a child in the nineties, we there was so much emphasis on understanding cultural differences, you know, appreciating cultural differences and noticing the ways different people do things.
And I think as I lived in different places that became actually quite strange to me that we would remark on so many sort of regular daily things as like something to appreciate and mark differences, rather than find some sort of a tribe among people who are comfortable in that state of not quite belonging.
Given that, I mean, it seems interesting to me that Asia is so committed to the idea of having a native friend in the city that they find themselves that the idea of having someone who does have deeper links to the place where they are is something that matters to her.
I think for her that is more exotic than you know what I was saying about, remarking on differences that someone could still be living in their town of birth and they know, you know, Waiters by name. That to her is very very special, and there is something there is something embarrassing about being a foreigner somewhere and not being integrated to its native culture. And yet that sort of is the reality of most of expatriate life. You
become friends with other foreigners. It's important for her to have Lena as this exotic friend, exotic native friend. And then you find out that Lena actually also is playing on the idea of the native, and that she is exoticizing herself in ways that Ussia thinks a native should be. And her background is different, that she grew up in the suburbs, and she's not this you know, cool and chic urbanite as she portrays well.
I mean, one of the things about foreigness, about living in a place that is new to you one way or the other, is the capacity for reinvention, and part of what's so lovely in The Anthropologists is that, in many ways it's a story about the way a relationship, a couple, a unit can reinvent themselves towards one another rather than distinctly.
I think also when because they're so free in their lack of roots, it's not just that they're reinventing themselves, it's also they are deciding on their own culture, siding on their ways of life, and they can really say, okay, well, what are our traditions going to be, what are our rituals going to be? And they can create all of
that from scratch, and that's quite a joyful experience. That's also another way of thinking of foreignness as not a state that's constantly lacking or defined by a sort of absence, but a state that has a lot of possibility and of freedom and creativity to it because of what it allows you to recreate or decide on your own.
Thank you so much for the gift that you've given us with not just this book, but all your books, and for being on the show.
Today, Michael, this was such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
I should go. Savalja's novel The Anthropologists is available at all good bookstores now, and do keep an eye out for her forthcoming collection of short stories. It's called Long Distance and it'll hit the shelves this July.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. We'll have another episode of read This to share with you next Sunday. As always, if you want to dive further into Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than eighty episodes in the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.