The Renovation by Kenan Orhan: Exile and memory

I was doubtful about the premise of Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation but sufficiently intrigued to give it a try. Dilara has commissioned some work on her ensuite bathroom now that her father has moved in with her and her husband. Her builders have been fiercely protective of their work, not allowing her to view it until they’ve packed up and left when she’s shocked to find a replica of a Silveri Prison cell familiar from Turkey, her homeland.

There were just the two pictures, yes, but over time, I’d made them the foundations on top of which I’d laid so many remembered events into tidy ordered narratives – and mine were counterfeit.

Dilara, her husband and her father have lived in Salerno for seven years. A child psychologist, she’s been unable to find work in their adopted country, dependent on income from her husband’s job as a mechanic. Instead, she’s a housewife and caregiver for her demented father, an academic, vocal against Erdoğan’s increasingly repressive regime, blacklisted and lucky to escape prison or worse before they fled Turkey. Dilara and her husband have made a life of sorts in Salerno, learning the language, making a few friends but they’re exiles who cannot return and she feels it. When her anxious husband discovers the nature of the renovation, his goes into freefall, leaving Dilara to struggle with her father’s care. Ironically, as life becomes harder outside of the cell, Dilara takes refuge there whenever she can. As her father fades away, she makes an irrevocable choice between her home and her homeland.

As you come in from the Black Sea, the city reveals itself in gradients of hills pouring into the water. Peel back this layer to see Bebek – now Arnavutköy, now Kuruçeşme – all green with white houses, like marble stairs down their hillsides. 

Touchingly dedicated to caregivers, Orhan’s fable-like debut explores themes of memory, homeland and exile in the context of Dilara’s relationship with her father and his decline. Like Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, you’ll need to suspend your disbelief, but its meaning seemed more straightforward to me, the prison cell standing as a metaphor both for the restrictions of care and for exile. Through Dilara’s voice, Orhan reveals what exile has meant for herself, her husband and her father against a background of the waves of repression and suppression enacted by Erdoğan’s government since 2014 on the doorstep of Europe which has conveniently turned a blind eye. Both Dilara and her husband have tried their best to make a life in Italy but while he feels at home she still yearns for a Turkey that she knows no longer exists, depicted in evocative descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of Istanbul. The ending is a shock, but it works. A slim, poignant and inventive novel which will stay with me for some time.

Hamish Hamilton: London 9780241745779 204 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)