About the book
Author: Kenan Orhan
Publisher: FSG
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
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My review
I’m a sucker for a literary fiction novel with a magical element, especially when that magical element carries a book-long metaphor (like Exit West, for example). So the conceit of this book is right up my alley: a woman finds that instead of a renovated bathroom, her contractor leaves her with a real-life portal to a prison cell of her home country of Turkey. Even so, without the Booker Prize nomination, I’m not sure I would have ended up reading it, and that would have been a shame because I liked it a lot and I expect it to stick with me for a long time.
What I loved most about this book was how it really leaned into the absurdism of the magical prison cell. Orhan does not try to explain it, and the main character rolls with it relatively quickly — she and we simply accept that this is the way it is now. This choice is what enables the whole rest of the book to be successful, in my opinion.
Because wow does Orhan give us a wonderful work of art exploring the fracturing of reality that comes with diaspora/displacement and the descent into fascism, plus the illogical but undeniable comfort of one’s home country even when it’s objectively more dangerous. He also gives us a deeply emotional look at the realities of caretaking for someone with dementia, including the desire to flee from that caretaking and how impossible it is to live with a kind of future grief.
It’s really quite something. You should read it.
Content and trigger warnings
Dementia
War / refugeeism
Police brutality
