THE RENOVATION

Are we doomed to be punished by the places that scorned us—and if so, who will serve that sentence?

Turkish American author Orhan (I Am My Country, 2023) expands one of his better short fictions into this claustrophobic, captivating allegory about family, country, and the failure of memory. When Turkish emigré Dilara hires a few cryptic builders to renovate an ensuite bathroom as she prepares her home in Baronissi, Italy, to accommodate her dying father, she’s justifiably impatient to see the results. She’s not, however, expecting to find a fully functioning prison cell mirroring the inside of a cell at Istanbul’s gargantuan Silivri Prison—complete with guards and fellow inmates with whom she can converse regularly. Other than the obvious anomaly, Orhan plays it completely straight as Dilara, a psychologist and child development specialist, tries to figure out the meaning of this literal hole in her world. Recounting the violence around the 2013 Gezi Park protests, she eventually explains the family’s flight from Turkey and her father’s subsequent descent into dementia that now requires her constant attention. The book is infected by sickness, both the cosmically unfair illness stealing away Dilara’s father and the failure of Turkey to protect its own or live up to the grace of its people. Meanwhile, Dilara’s nameless and endlessly anxious husband, already absent in spirit, flees for a short-term gig elsewhere. As the prison grows more enveloping than her everyday life, her father, formerly a writer and activist, shifts from deteriorating to semi-lucid; Dilara suspects these two things and the strange memories and episodes she’s experiencing are connected. There’s a lot of emotional power between the drama and the premise here—what seems merely impossible is quickly overwhelmed by the tale’s connecting thread, this inability to recover what has been lost. It’s an odd, elegant little book with disarming sincerity that belies its metaphysical hocus pocus, held aloft by keen literary wordplay and an evocative exploration of what homeland really means.

A one-way trip to the Twilight Zone via a self-imposed life sentence.