The Renovation - Kenan Orhan
The Booker really does love a migrant novel. It has an excellent track record of recognising writers in diaspora, and it particularly seems to gravitate towards books about grieving a homeland, or a culture, that still exists but that you can no longer go back to. This sits very firmly within that tradition. It's a very Booker Prize book. I know the committee likes to insist you can never spot a Booker book until it's already been longlisted, but this is one of those cases where, if you'd handed it to me five months ago with no context at all, I'd have told you it had Booker longlist written all over it.
I really liked this one. It's surreal and slippery in the way it moves, but it never loses its grip on real, grounded human emotion, on the complexity of grief and pain and suffering. What I appreciated most is that it understands something true, which is that even in the middle of pain, even when everything is bad, people still find the humour in it. There's a lot of very subtle, very dark comedy running through this book, the kind that makes you question whether you're actually allowed to be enjoying yourself given how bleak everything around you has become.
The strongest thread for me was the parallel Orhan draws between the narrator's retreat into the Turkish prison that appears, unexplained, through the door of her bedroom, and her father's retreat into Alzheimer's. It's a lovely piece of mirroring. He's losing his memories of life in Turkey, of the reasons the family had to leave for Italy in the first place, of his life more generally, while she's retreating further and further into her own memories of a land she's lost and can't return to. Two people moving away from each other in opposite directions, essentially, but for the same reason.
The writing is gorgeous. This is a short book, but it took me several days to get through because I kept stopping just to sit with sentences and make sure I was giving them the attention they deserved. It's surreal, faintly Kafkaesque in places, sad and funny in the same breath. It's a book about grief, about Alzheimer's, about diaspora, about fascism. There's an enormous amount packed into a small space, and I suspect this is one that will only get richer on a reread.
It absolutely deserves its spot on the longlist, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see it make the shortlist, though I should caveat that with the fact I've only read a third of this year's list so far, so take that prediction for what it's worth.
As I said in an earlier Booker review I'm rating these books out of 10 even though that's not normally something I do, just to help me figure out my own shortlist. I'm giving this a strong 7 out of 10. When I wrote about Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, I said I'd more or less talked myself into an 8, but having now read The Renovation, I've settled that book back down to a 7. This is also a 7, but a firmer one, enough to knock The Things We Never Say into third place on my little leaderboard.