Walking on the Ceiling
A Novel
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3.7 • 12 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"[Savaş] writes with both sensuality and coolness, as if determined to find a rational explanation for the irrationality of existence..." -- The New York Times
"I fell in love with this book." -- Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation
A mesmerizing novel set in Paris and a changing Istanbul, about a young Turkish woman grappling with her past and her complicated relationship with a famous British writer.
After her mother's death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.
M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him. She recounts the idyllic landscapes of her past, mythical family meals, and her elaborate childhood games. As she does so, she also begins to confront her mother's silence and anger, her father's death, and the growing unrest in Istanbul. Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu's fear of revealing too much to M. and of giving too much of herself and her Istanbul away. Most of all, she fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she's told to protect herself from her memories.
A wise and unguarded glimpse into a young woman's coming into her own, Walking on the Ceiling is about memory, the pleasure of invention, and those places, real and imagined, we can't escape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dislocations of place, identity, time, and truth eddy through Savas's elegant debut. Back in her native city of Istanbul after her mother's death, Nurunisa lives amid its constant changes while reflecting on a short but transformative period when she lived in Paris. Seeking to avoid a conventional future and a painful family past, she enrolls in a literature program there. At a bookstore reading, Nunu meets M, an older man whose English-language novels about Turkey she admires. In their emails and long walks, Nunu finds the sense of connection she has longed for. Though their bond is deep, Nunu is not entirely candid with M about the ambiguous figures who have shaped her life, at first eliding some of her most complex experiences with her father, a former writer who descended into mental illness, and her mother, Nejla, with whom she has a fraught relationship; only gradually do these stories emerge. Interweaving past and present, Paris and Istanbul, evasion and epiphany in spare yet evocative prose, Savas's moving coming-of-age novel offers a rich exploration of intimacy, loneliness, and the endless fluidity of historical, cultural, and personal narrative.)
