Flickering realities behind a mirage

Imagine: a couple lives in a foreign city. Their jobs are irregular — perhaps they work in the creative field, or in a nonprofit. They are sometimes happy, or they think that they should be. They have a sense that their life could be better; they’re striving towards a particular way of living. Around them, the 21st century moves and shifts, and extends its hold on them — in the form of late-stage capitalism, gentrification, and social media. This broad-strokes description is the plot of not one but two recent novels: Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists, and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes). But if they’re approaching a similar idea —an existential question about what constitutes a “real” life in today’s world — they’re approaching it from completely different directions.

In The Anthropologists, a couple is looking for a home, attempting to put down roots. Our first-person narrator, Asya, is a documentary filmmaker, living with her husband, Manu, in a city neither of them was born in. Uprooted from a family tradition, they must build their history from scratch — inventing daily rituals and customs, navigating life as if walking a city without a map. In vignettes, we see the mundanities of their everyday life: the joy, the failures, the ordinariness and wonder, the search for meaning in everyday minutiae. But there’s a sense that they’re attempting to strive towards something, even if that something is not yet clear to Asya. She reflects on a lecture from her anthropology classes, a way to look at life anew: “Imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routine with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless.”

The narrative of Perfection, in some ways, takes the form of Asya’s nameless anthropologist — a third-person narrator dissecting the rituals of daily life, laying them bare for the reader to see. But while The Anthropologists invites us to join Asya as she figures out a way to live, Perfection’s anthropological gaze serves to satirise how its protagonists, Anna and Tom, navigate contemporary life. Anna and Tom are “creative professionals” who increasingly find the creativity of their jobs overtaken by necessity—“during walks in the woods, they dreamed of the Photoshop toolbars floating in front of them, inviting them to clone-stamp a pine forest or stream.”

Like Asya and Manu, they’re in a foreign city, Berlin, trying to set down roots. But in some ways, Anna and Tom know the something they’re striving for — an elusive “perfection,” a life that announces itself as being desirable in every way: the house they live in, the activities they engage in, the things they own. Perfection is a sharp (and sharply funny) view of a couple desperate for authenticity, but who find themselves chasing a mirage. But is a life that looks perfect actually perfect? Perfection opens with a description of an apartment, complete with monstera plants throwing shadows on the wall, a limited-edition record of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, mason jars of spices, and hardwood floors. Proof of perfection is something external and displayable: what do your things say about you? Asya and Manu aren’t immune either: Asya replaces her framed posters with paintings, thinking, “We liked the paintings, yes, but we also liked what they might mean about us — people with real paintings on their walls.” Perfection reminds us of the link between individuality and consumerism: “Individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.” Who decides what a “real life” looks like?

Through The Anthropologists, Asya reflects on her image of an ideal life, and wonders where that image comes from. “All this time, we were waiting,” she says, for the announcement of “life itself.” But she realises that the work of being alive is stranger, more mundane, and only as meaningful as we make it. Anna and Tom are much less lucky, motivated by what they’re told a perfect life should look and feel like. If Perfection offers us a view of what cultural homogeneity does to our lives in today’s world, The Anthropologists offers us a way to break out of it.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves. The reviewer is a writer and illustrator.