Kenan Orhan tackles themes of exile, fear and memory

Throughout the novel, the father's memory seems to erode, while the prison cell tries to preserve an entire nation's memory. In your view, was dementia a loss of individual memory, or a metaphor for a collective memory threatened with oblivion?

I was interested in both, and in the places they intersect. The amount of the past, the amount of ourselves that exists in our forefathers, is a very sudden realisation when they begin to lose their minds in front of us, or at least it was for me personally, to see the amount of my own history sort of crumbling in an erasure of the past as all those moments of my youth, all the memories of childhood held by my last remaining grandparent, all started to fray and unwind and shift. But more than that, a state is made up of its people's ideals and hopes and memories.

I think what is most interesting to me about authoritarian regimes is the way they try to adjust the past, the ways they rewrite their histories. There are, of course, the obvious methods, and the state apparatuses that facilitate this are usually self-evident, but there are more insidious methods too: the way a lie repeated to the people over and over eventually drowns out the memory of the truth. We exist as narrative creatures, organising our personal histories into a sort of linearity, and so we are very much beholden to memory; yet memory is constantly in flux, it is difficult to pin down, and it is susceptible to corrosion.

Our identities are in this constant struggle of ossifying our past and renovating the idea of ourselves, and this is inextricably linked to the states we find ourselves under. The more susceptible we are to revisions of the past, the more pliable we are as a people under the authoritarian's thumb.

Dilara receives news of her homeland through foreign media. Were you exploring the fragility of truth, or the difficulty of seeing one's homeland from both within and without at the same time?

I think in countries with compromised news outlets, it is hard to take reportage at face value. Dilara has three ways she interacts with the politics of home, and those are the inmates, her aunts that call now and again, and the impersonal news that filters through television and the internet, and they all offer slightly different views of truth, or perhaps a good way to say it is each of them offers a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional object from different vantage points. By piecing them together, Dilara can reconstruct the "truth" of events, but her own personal connection to the news is missing, so it remains an impersonal truth rather than a lived one.

The closest she gets is during the earthquake, while she's in prison, keeping herself there to experience things exactly as she would have if she'd stayed in Türkiye and been arrested. But simultaneously, it is difficult to capture the scale of grief in disasters when viewing them from foreign shores; it is difficult to imagine the mood of a city in the wake of catastrophe without being there.

It is painful to see a grand tragedy take place in a homeland thousands of miles from your home and not knowing the appropriate amount of grief to experience, not knowing if it is improper to ignore that distance, not knowing if instead it is callous to shield yourself. The duality of being an émigré feels almost as absurd to me as this novel, and I think that's what this book is trying to show: the instability, absurdity, flux, and fragility of a straddled existence.

In the novel, the boundary between home and prison, between freedom and confinement, collapses. To what extent was this blurring intentional, serving as an expression of the impact of tyranny that transcends physical boundaries?

It's always a good idea for a writer to say it was intentional when a clever reader notices something smart. Of course, part of this novel is very interested in the panopticon-like world we live in, from hyper-surveillance and the long arm of the state reaching everyone, to how we participate in our own imprisonment by posting everything about ourselves online for data-hungry corporations to collect.

New technologies we're churning out erode our privacy and keep many impoverished all while seeming to be in service of a police state that seeks to turn all of its citizens into prisoners. But for me, the novel started with a more basic human condition. I wanted to explore the collapse of these boundaries—home and prison, freedom and confinement—in relationship to caregiving and Alzheimer's. How much is love itself a prison? Is the past an escape, or does it end up swallowing us, too? Is home the soil you grew up in, the place where the people you love reside, or is it where you most feel peace, most feel alive?

You began your literary career writing short stories, then moved to novels. How did this shift affect your writing tools? Did the novel impose a different rhythm on you when addressing complex themes like memory and exile?

I was very aware of how much digging a novel requires. I see novels as accumulation and interrogation, while short stories are tension and lightness. For me, there was a dramatic shift from the realm of hints and suggestions my stories tend to come from to this dig site I was meant to excavate—or at least that is a good analogy for how my process changed. I tried to sit longer inside my scenes, or else present a series of scenes each shining a slightly different light on a now more nuanced subject.

I found myself inspired by authors of digression, particularly W. G. Sebald, and I enjoyed the room to do so. But I missed the freedom of writing short stories while working on the novel. To me there is an electric charge almost to writing a short story. It comes out of you much faster, and so are products of a person who is not themselves going through a change. They are more focused that way. A novel takes months or years, and in that time the writer's mood toward the work changes, the ideas bend a little, the seasons march on. A short story feels encapsulated to me. I have felt I have finished a short story (though maybe I've never actually written an ending), but I've never felt finished with a novel. Eventually the work just ends.

In the novel, a completely realistic event coexists with an impossible one without the reader perceiving a break in the rhythm. How did you maintain this balance so both feel like part of the same world?

For a simple, if somewhat bumbling, explanation: I think the trick to absurdist elements in my fiction is to play it very straight, much like the best slapstick and comedies; the more seriously you take it, the better it is. And indeed, much like a good joke, I think good fables, good fairy tales operate best when they aren't trying to explain their contents. I love fables and fairy tales. I used to teach a sort of retrospective on the fable from One Thousand and One Nights to today. One thing I'm so charmed by is the fable's ability to quickly introduce new rules to an otherwise mundane world.

It asks a lot of its reader to trust it, but I think quite cleverly most fables introduce strangeness and the patterns to understand them quite early. They move swiftly from point to point to point on their axis of narrative, leaving you very little time to question things. If you pause in your set-up of the absurd, even for a moment, you risk a gap into which a bit of the reader's doubt can enter.

I think it's easier with a shorter form. But that's why we start with the absurd. The novel's first line tells us a cell in Silivri Prison was installed in a bathroom by mistake. If the reader can get over that first line, they're open to almost anything.

Political fantasy, dark realism, and exile literature intersect in your texts. Which literary figures have most shaped your taste and narrative structure? And which writers do you feel you owe your worldview and your portrayal of human suffering to?

Probably Kafka is the most influential, because he taught me the most lessons. I think I could blame Milan Kundera for my penchant for the lopsided structure of this novel and its insistence on presenting political history in rather expository ways. But I think Kundera has a bit too much chauvinism and not enough fun. Authors like Nikolai Gogol, Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Kelly Link, and Aimee Bender have greatly shaped my ideas of fun, the tricks a writer ought to play, and the lightness necessary when broaching rather heavy subjects. But voice and style I tried to learn from authors like Elena Ferrante, Anne Carson, Bilge Karasu, Tezer Özlü, Maria Reva, W. G. Sebald, Michael Ondaatje, Angela Carter, and Rajesh Parameswaran.

I don't think, looking at those names, any sort of connecting tissue holds them all together, but they have, in their own ways, each written things that have impressed upon me the need to face human suffering with a bit of empathy and gallows humour, an appreciation for finely-tuned sentences, and the importance of a bit of mischief and disobedience in fiction.

After finishing your first novel, The Renovation, what question kept haunting you that the novel itself couldn't answer?

What a marvellous question. Not to sound too flippant, but the question that's really haunting me is: what the hell am I supposed to do now? I don't mean what I should write next; I mean what my career looks like now. This book is a product of a lot of fear and grief and anger at the realities facing Türkiye. This book was a vessel into which I could sink so much exhaustion and disappointment and outsized hope. I knew writing this book would not change Türkiye's course, and I was never deluded into thinking it might, but having written this story, having excavated not just the political fear but the human fears I have regarding my family, my relatives in Istanbul, I don't know what the novel does, how it functions.

Nothing comes back to me: not the ten years I spent away from Istanbul and my relatives, not the memories I am losing of them, not the country I feel like I'm mourning. I wanted to create this thing almost as a conduit for my thoughts and emotions, but now that I've done so, I'm not sure what it adds up to. Fortunately, I think that is where my job as the writer ends anyway. It is up to the reader now; that is the function of novels as I see them. Literature is a tandem act. I hope this novel asks a few questions of readers that they (like seeds already planted) can answer.