Given the big stack of unread novels on my bookshelf, I had no business ordering another one. But when the Booker longlist came out, I thought one more wouldn’t hurt. Besides, I hadn’t read any of the titles on the longlist, my reading repertoire was clearly deficient. After a cursory glance at the blurbs, I picked The Renovation by Kenan Orhan. 

The novel is funny and serious, inherently absurd yet fully convincing. 

Dilara, her husband, and her father who suffers from dementia are Turkish exiles living in an Italian village. When Dilara commissions builders to renovate a bathroom in her small flat, things go horribly wrong. When the project is done, it is not a bathroom at all, but a cell from Silivri Prison in Istanbul, complete with a steel toilet-and-sink unit, and a guard walking past the bars.

At first, Dilara is furious. She struggles to care for her father, manage the tight family budget, and preserve her marriage. Gradually, her anger gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses other prisoners. In the strange air of the cell, she smells the sesame scent of baked simit, the salty breeze of the Marmara, and the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe. The prison cell becomes a portal, transporting her to Istanbul, showing her slivers of the city and experiences she has left behind. 

What interested me the most were the metaphorical comparisons of Dilara’s prison-bathroom, to the prison of living in a new country with no friends, and the prison of being her father’s caretaker. These sections are rendered with sensitivity and vividness.  

While her father continues to deteriorate, we witness Dilara’s complex emotions. 

“Even if I showed him photograph after photograph, nothing would penetrate the shell that protected the Istanbul of his past. I started thinking of him as a walking, breathing time capsule… holding his separate Istanbul like a stone in his palm, apart from me and the rest of the world. Soon this too would go. My father’s head was getting lighter. His brain was shrinking the way a sponge dries into a brittle form. What parts of him have already evaporated? What is the weight of a memory?” 

The final pages are quiet and devastating and take the mastery of the novel to a whole new level.