In The Renovation we meet Dilara, who, with her Alzheimer’s-suffering father and neurotic husband, lives in a small flat in Italy after fleeing Erdogan’s increasingly constrictive regime in Turkey.
The novel begins when what was supposed to be a new bathroom is instead transformed into a cell in a women’s prison in Turkey. And so we’re given, with this tidy little legerdemain, the split-self experience of the exile. Dilara exists in two prisons, that of her life as an exile, and the actual prison she knows she would have ended up in had she never left.
This is skilfully aligned with the situation of Alzheimer’s, and of grief. It is so skilful, in fact, that the novel has that dizzying effect of seeming to be laden with too much understated meaning to be fully comprehensible.
Reading, I was put in mind of the political acuity and implied depths, all conveyed with featherlight dexterity, so characteristic of the contemporary American short story (only afterwards did I discover that The Renovation was expanded out of just that).
READ MORE
There’s no denying that this is a genuinely noble novel, worth reading for the political education it provides alone. It’s also extremely well-written, filled with crisp, clean sentences brimming with effective descriptions and insights that appear so insightful they’re momentarily bamboozling. It’s also funny, in a satisfyingly absurdist way.
So why this feeling of it not quite landing? The word “grotesque” is repeatedly so regularly I thought it was a fault of the translator. But no, this isn’t a translation (as I also discovered afterwards), but a novel written in English by a male Turkish emigrant based in Kansas. And, for me, that’s how it read; like a novel written about a Turkish woman’s experience of exile from Turkey, as imagined by a Turkish-American man who cares deeply about her plight.
I believe, unequivocally, that anyone can write anything in fiction – any place, gender or experience. But it must land. Trying to comprehend Dilara as a female character, I found a bodiless mouthpiece, one being used to tell the (again, important) story of Erdogan’s Turkey. Still, as a deftly composed, faintly magical-realist political agenda novel (with laughs), this is certainly worth reading.
Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of two short story collections, Paris Syndrome (2019) and Let’s Dance (2024), both published by Banshee Press. Her debut novel is forthcoming in September 2027
