Some days, it's difficult to believe that this friendship really existed – with its particular logic, its detachment from the world. What I remember has the texture of a dream, an invention, a strange and weightless suspension, like walking on the ceiling.
Walking on the Ceiling is a strange little novel to pigeonhole – it's so wispy and spare, yet sketches a life in a way that we all would recognise as faithful to the processes of memory, storytelling, and self-mythologising. With a main character who thinks about her time in Paris after she returns to her hometown of Istanbul, and who had spent her time in Paris talking about Istanbul, the reader is not only treated to an intimate portrait of both cities but is witness to a damaged young woman's coming-of-age; a reckoning with her past and a squaring off to the future. Everything feels small about this book – from the weight of it in the hands to chapters as brief as two sentences – but its impact is big; call me impressed with this debut by Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I think more and more these days that I should set down some of the facts of my friendship with M., to keep something of this time intact. But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind. And I have to admit that there is no shape in those long walks and conversations, even if I think of them often.As Nurunisa (Nunu) tells her story, we learn that she was raised in Instanbul – her father was a poet who died young and her mother never quite got over her widowhood – and in order to escape the sadness of her homelife, Nunu went abroad to study; eventually enrolling in a Masters program in literature in Paris. While in Paris, she meets the famous British author she refers to only as “M.” – a man whose popular English language books about Istanbul had been a favourite of Nunu's, but which her mother mocked as obviously the limited views of a foreigner – and as the pair strike up a friendship and begin to go on long walks around the city and have frequent email conversations, Nunu finds herself carefully choosing and shaping the sorts of stories that she'll tell the author about the reality of having grown up in Istanbul – stories that are often not faithful to that reality, or stories of her mother's that she has co-opted as her own. As the book goes on and Nunu remembers conversations that she had had with her undergrad college roommate and a later live-in boyfriend, she reveals that this cribbing and fibbing is something she has always done – to her roommate, making her mother sound lovely; to her boyfriend, making her sound horrid. The shortest chapter in its entirety:
I'm trying to say that I've tried to tell a story about her many times. But none have resembled my mother.Because Walking on the Ceiling is a book about writers (Nunu herself becomes a journalist at a travel magazine after she returns to a now volatile Istanbul), there are frequent meditations on the nature of writing and storytelling (which is something I like when it's done well, as it is here). On the one hand, one assumes that M. will appropriate Nunu's stories for his latest “Thracian” novel, but on the other, she's aware of that fact and carefully curates what she shares; it's hard to say who's using whom, and especially when these conversations help Nunu to sort things out in her own mind.
Stories have their own logic. For one thing, a story can only be told once it has an ending. For another, it builds, and then unravels. Each element of a story is essential; its time will come and it will ultimately mean something. In this way, stories are accountable, because they can look you in the eye.Eventually, each element in this novel reveals its importance along the way, and Nunu's story feels both particular and universal. The fact that this happens in so short a space feels powerful and precise. A lovely read.
