Aysegul Savas
Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegul Savas unfolds in the first-person point of view of Nunu. The narrative consists of two, intertwining threads. In the first thread, Nunu recalls her past: growing up in Istanbul, living in London with her then boyfriend, and her complex relationship with her mother. The second thread consists of Nunu as a student in Paris and her attachment to the author M. She describes their long walks together through the streets of Paris, their conversations, and the stories they share. The novel takes the form of flashbacks and short vignettes. It has little to no plot.
Nunu’s interior is rich, complex, and mesmerizing. Her voice is intimate, allowing brief glimpses of her troubled childhood, the mind-games she plays with her mother, and their failed attempts at connection. She is intentionally evasive about her past, dropping hints here and there but never elaborating. Her critical observations and analyses are reserved for those around her and for the city streets she frequents in the alternating cities. The short, non-linear chapters, sometimes no longer than one or two lines, replicate the snippets of memory she conjures.
By her own admission, Nunu lies. She creates fictionalized versions of herself to enchant the people around her. She fabricates a version of her home life to her boyfriend in England, a different version to her university roommate, and yet another version to M. She lies to her mother and aunts about her life in Paris. She appropriates and embellishes her mother’s stories, claiming them as her own. She lies to M by claiming to write a novel about her mother’s former neighbor. Her identity is fluid. She determines what her audience needs to see in her, and she obliges by projecting the required persona. As a result, she remains an enigma both to her audience and to her readers.
The writing is elegant and spare; the tone is intimate, muted, and permeated with a profound sense of loneliness. Nunu is never boring. We watch as she gets close to an individual and then retreats if she feels she is revealing too much of herself or her life. Her vivid imagination enables her to describe scenes and characters with the eyes of a poet. Her uncanny ability to focus on seemingly inconsequential details enables her to speak volumes about a character by, for example, simply focusing on his hand gestures. Her voice is hypnotic.
This is a stunning novel in which the action—if it can even be called action—consists of a fascinating exploration of a character’s interiority and the role memory and story-telling play in creating fictionalized versions of herself.
Highly recommended.