Five weeks of tile saws and thudding in The Renovation by Kenan Orhan. A tarpaulin over the door like an air lock, so nobody can see in. A new lock the builders keep the only key to. Then one afternoon they emerge in a jittery huddle, say it’s done, the bill will follow in a fortnight, and dash off.
She pulls the tarp aside. Where the waterfall shower with two heads and the marble bench were supposed to go, there is a prison cell. A combined steel toilet and washbasin. A cot on a metal frame. A little table with a seat hinged to the wall. And out beyond the bars, a guard on his rounds, who looks every bit as startled as she is.
She asks him where she is. Silivri Prison, he says. She points out that this is meant to be her bathroom. He considers this, and asks how she knows her bathroom isn’t in Silivri Prison rather than the other way round.
I laughed properly at that. I want to be clear about it, because of where The Renovation by Kenan Orhan goes.
What Kenan Orhan Is Actually Writing About
Dilara is Turkish, living in a village outside Salerno since 2017. She was a school psychologist in Istanbul and has found no work in Italy. Her husband fixes cars. Her father occupies the room where they used to eat, and has had Alzheimer’s for eight years.
He was a political academic and a novelist with a talent for annoying the government. A stranger followed him down a path near his university and beat him with a gun butt. He was purged from his post, then blacklisted everywhere, and that is why they left.
By the time the cell arrives, his vocabulary has shrunk to one phrase that has to do the work of everything he can no longer say: “It isn’t correct.”
So: the husband finds the prison, decides the Turkish state now has a door into their flat, and bolts. Dilara stays put. And she starts spending time in the cell.
Why Kenan Orhan Keeps Sending Her Back In
Because the cell gives her Turkey.
She thinks about coffee and there is a cup of it, the foam exactly like the place in Beyoğlu her father took her to as a child. She thinks about marzipan from the baker in Kuruçeşme and it is on the table. Once the room simply fills with the Bosporus, sea bream and eels and gulls and a ferry horn, and she stands in it with her toes on the pebbles.
None of it survives the trip out. Whatever she carries back to Italy dissolves at the edge of her vision. The country is available to her only on the condition that she stays in the cell.
It is a wonderful idea and Kenan Orhan is smart enough not to over-explain it. He lets it work on her instead, and we watch her go in more often, stay longer, and finally start sleeping in there.
The Father Is Why You Read Kenan Orhan
I want to talk about this properly, because it is the reason to read The Renovation by Kenan Orhan.
Dementia in fiction is usually softened. It gets a wistful register, a scene where the parent has a moment of clarity, a redemptive line. There is none of that here. Orhan writes the sores that will not heal, the whiskey poured over a salad instead of oil, the salt shaker put away in the medicine cabinet with a trail of salt behind it, the shit.
The worst of it is a scene in an optician’s, where Dilara is being fitted for new glasses and her father works his way along a display case, taking down each pair in turn, letting them fall, then breaking them in his fists, repeating the only sentence he has left while the receptionist shrieks about the cost.
And then, much later, there is a moment involving his cane and three minutes in which she does not get out of bed. She never explains it. She says only: I deserved to hurt.
I have not been able to stop thinking about those three minutes.
Where It Falters
Two things, and one of them matters.
The husband is barely there. He is anxiety and a running gag about ulcers, and he leaves early, and I could not tell you what he wants or who he is. Since his absence shapes the whole back half, that is a real hole.
The bigger issue is the history. There are long passages on Gezi Park, the split with the Gülenists, the bombing years, the 2016 coup night, the purges. Some of it is superb, and the coup chapter in particular is one of the best things in the book. But there are stretches where the novel simply stops and delivers a briefing. If you already know this material, you’ll skim. If you don’t, you may find yourself reading a book you didn’t sign up for in the middle of one you did.
Two Photographs, and What Kenan Orhan Does With Them
The bit I keep coming back to, other than the cane, is small.
She goes looking for two photographs taken on her last night in Istanbul, at a restaurant on a terrace over the Bosporus. She has looked at them a thousand times; they were her phone background for a year. When she finally finds the files, they are all wrong. The patio she remembered as nearly empty is packed. The couple she remembered as old and German are young and probably neither. The inlet in the background does not exist on any map.
Kenan Orhan lets her sit with it: years of memory stacked on two pictures, and the pictures were never what she thought.
That is what The Renovation by Kenan Orhan keeps doing. It takes something you assumed was solid and shows you the join.
Before You Start
Please know: The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is a book about dementia and it does not flinch. Incontinence, aggression, the physical indignities, and the rage of the person doing the caring. It also contains the 2023 earthquakes in southern Turkey, people jailed on no real charge, and a violent attack on a pensioner.
It is dedicated to caregivers. If you are one, this will either be the most seen you have felt in a year or completely impossible. Only you know which.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Orhan’s story collection I Am My Country and Other Stories is where to go next for the same voice at shorter range. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak covers Turkish memory on a grander, warmer scale. Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is the closest cousin for the way things disappear from a country and a mind at the same rate. And for the Gezi Park protests that open the novel’s backstory, the real history is worth an hour of reading before you start.
Where It Leaves You
Somewhere in the fourth part, Dilara works out that the ideal prisoner is a person with no memories. They get fed. They get their medication. And they get an hour of air in a yard they cannot get lost in. No rent, no envelopes, no utility companies. She works the thought over and decides that low-security prison is basically hospice care with the same expectations of mistreatment, except nobody sends you a bill.
It reads like a joke when she first thinks it. It is not one.
I won’t tell you how it ends. I’ll say only that Kenan Orhan has written a first novel that is genuinely funny about bureaucracy, unusually honest about hating someone you are killing yourself to care for, and completely unsentimental about what a country does to the people who leave it. The last page took the floor out from under me.
She wanted a waterfall shower. What she got was somewhere to go.