Another one for Novellas in November.
The narrator, Asya, of The Anthropologists is a young woman married to Manu, whom she has known since she was in school. They are both foreigners in their unnamed country, and a sense of tentativeness and lack of ritual preoccupies her, as does their lack of community. Asya, who works as a freelance documentarian and film editor, seems concerned to make more friends, while Manu, who works for a nonprofit, would usually prefer to stay home except for their evenings with their friend Ravi.
Asya, who is seldom named in the novel, is interested in people’s everyday lives, so she decides to do a film about the people in a nearby park. In addition, they both decide it’s time to own an apartment, so they begin looking for a new home. They live simply with few conveniences, which their parents don’t understand.
It’s hard to describe this novel, because it also is concerned with the details of everyday life. The couple look at apartments; visit their upstairs neighbor Tereza, an elderly woman who is losing her memory; hang out with various of their friends and unsuccessfully try to mix them; and so on. Yet, I found myself compelled to read on. The language is spare and simple, the sections short. Every once in a while, in sections called “In the Park,” we hear from the people Asya is interviewing, but this change of narrators is so subtle that it took me until about the fifth one to realize I was hearing from someone else.
