SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There are lots of home renovation nightmares, but none perhaps quite so chilling as when Dilara and her husband - both Turkish exiles living in Italy - remodeled their bathroom. Our narrator, Dilara, moves aside a tarp to see the finished bathroom and finds herself inside a Turkish prison cell complete with guards.
KENAN ORHAN: (Reading) The guard, who really could've been my contractor in disguise, seemed genuinely shocked to see me. What is this, he exclaimed in Turkish. He paused with a stupefied look on his face. Where am I, I responded in Turkish. Are you sick? Silivri Prison. I was growing impatient. That's not right. This is supposed to be a waterfall shower with two heads and massaging jets and a marble bench. Massaging jets, haha. No. This is a prison. But what's it doing in my bathroom, I asked. He looked into the cell and frowned. Now, how did they mess up like that?
SIMON: Kenan Orhan reading from his debut novel, "The Renovation." He joins us now from Kansas City. Thank you so much for being with us.
ORHAN: Oh, it's my delight.
SIMON: Prison inside a bathroom. It's quite a design feature. What's it look like?
ORHAN: (Laughter) It's a little bit magical, this prison. It occupies a space that's an impossible space, of course. Her little ensuite closet that got turned into a bathroom ends up growing and growing and growing into Silivri Prison, which is an actual prison in Turkey. It's a maximum security. So not exactly an inviting bathroom.
SIMON: And they renovate the bathroom in the first place because Dilara's father has Alzheimer's and is living with them. Help us understand this family.
ORHAN: So Dilara and her father and her husband are largely kind of Turkish intellectuals who in the rising authoritarianism over the 20-teens (ph) have found themselves sort of in the crosshairs of the government crackdown, and they decided to flee Turkey after her father was attacked by a political thug.
SIMON: Yeah.
ORHAN: So I think a lot of who Dilara is is stuck in the past. She's obsessed with the halcyon days of Istanbul. She misses a lot of the memories, a lot of the friends, a lot of the family back home. And so moving for her was a political necessity rather than something she desired.
SIMON: Against all expectation, does Dilara begin to find a kind of respite in her prison cell?
ORHAN: Yes. She really gloms onto this obsession with being back in Turkey, which, of course, might seem incredibly foreign to us, wanting to spend time in a prison cell. But after 10 years in Italy and not really engaging, speaking in Turkish, not really thinking in Turkish anymore, missing the sights, the sounds, the smells and tastes of Istanbul, suddenly she finds herself surrounded by some other inmates who all speak Turkish who know what's going on in the country. She finds a lot of camaraderie in these people who start filling up the prison cells around her. And more than that, the cell itself starts to provide these nuggets of magic for her, whether it's a delicious cup of coffee from her favorite cafe or sweet rolls of marzipan that are just like her favorite postija (ph) in Istanbul. She convinces herself that it's worth it being confined to a place.
SIMON: Let me ask about the glimpses we get of her father in the past. He seems like quite an engaging and even noble person.
ORHAN: Father is someone who I would aspire to be. He has his shortcomings. He's not exactly the perfect father, but he's someone who's very politically aware and very comfortable kind of voicing his opinions against an authoritarian regime. I'm always impressed by the people of Turkey who will risk prison and even worse to state their opinions against rising authoritarianism, against democratic backsliding. I'm incredibly privileged writing as I am in America about these things. So it's an impressive thing, I think, to be in a place and to face the dangers of speaking your voice.
SIMON: You also write very movingly about dementia. How do you know about this part of the book?
ORHAN: My grandmother, who was the one who emigrated with my grandfather to America from Istanbul and who we've all kind of put a lot of our trust in the past in, we use her as a source for remembering Istanbul after we hadn't been for many years. She started showing some signs of memory loss pretty near to when I started writing this book, and it became suddenly very terrifying to me, this person who tells me stories of being a 3-year-old in a flotation device in the sea, and we're all having fun, and we're all getting tan, and our hair is becoming blonde and eating ice cream on the shore. And then, suddenly, she kind of starts to forget those moments, and she starts remembering parts of Istanbul that I do explicitly remember. And she's kind of misremembering them to the point where I start to question whether or not I'm remembering my relatives correctly, whether or not I remember the way my cousin was. All of us were suddenly a little jarred by this dissolving of our past.
SIMON: Yeah. As the novel goes on, it's hard not to wonder if the prison you describe is just not an expression of the political tumult in Turkey, but also of the personal tumult inside Dilara's family.
ORHAN: It is. There are actually two prisons in this book. There's the political prison Dilara fled with her family from Istanbul. But what she couldn't flee is the prison of care. It's very difficult to be a caregiver in health care, but I think doing it for your own relatives is very different and very demanding. And watching them kind of unravel in front of you while also having to take care of them is insanely difficult, especially in the duality of how they used to raise you.
SIMON: I have read about a Turkish word. I'll need your help in pronouncing it - huzun.
ORHAN: Ah, huzun.
SIMON: I wrote down what I found out it's supposed to mean, but why don't you tell me?
ORHAN: It's one of those fun little words that I think people sort of oversensationalize how untranslatable it is, but it's this - it's a longing for things that are missed and missed in a way that perhaps you can't surmount but are worth missing. They're worth collecting and holding on to and remembering them. It affects all of us deeply, whether we call it melancholy or nostalgia or huzun. I think we all have moments in our lives where with great clarity, we become aware of a past, and we become aware of, you know, our own mortality in a way. But it makes those moments, those things that we remember tenderly, all the sweeter, I think.
SIMON: And do you feel that for Turkey, your life in Turkey?
ORHAN: I do. It's a - it was difficult writing this book in regard to that because there was a lot of my own fear and a lot of my own grief in this book that I generally, until writing this, wasn't ever a huge fan of doing. I generally like to write about other people. But this was very much my angers at the regime, my angers at the policies that seem to be destroying Turkey behind my back, but also this deep fear and sense of loss that kind of no matter what happens now, no matter how hard I hold on to the memories of the past, no matter how drastic a political change might be in store for Turkey, no matter what happens to this regime when it's finally ousted, I'll never actually be able to go back to the Turkey that I knew. We're both 10-year strangers from each other now, 12-year strangers. I think in the wake of not going back for so long, it's become a gloomier but still beloved place for me.
SIMON: Kenan Orhan. His debut novel, "The Renovation." Thank you so much for being with us.
ORHAN: Oh, the pleasure was all mine.
(SOUNDBITE OF J DILLA SONG "SO FAR TO GO (FEAT COMMON AND D'ANGELO)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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