First Impressions
“The Renovation” is a brilliant debut novel whose profundity develops gradually over the course of the story. On the surface it has a fairly straightforward, symbolic premise: a woman has her bathroom renovated, and instead of a bathroom, the workers leave behind a prison cell. Some readers quite rightly will label this as surreal, or Kafkaesque, but for me it carried such real-world emotional weight that I connected with it on multiple levels at once.
Premise
We follow Dilara, who moved to Italy from her native Turkey about a decade ago with her husband and her father. He has now moved in with them as he’s developing Alzheimer's. The renovation happens to make more room for him, but when the construction finishes, Dilara finds a Turkish prison cell where her bathroom should be, eventually revealed to be modelled on Turkey's real Silivri Prison. On one level, this obviously mirrors how caring for her father has come to feel like its own kind of imprisonment, and how living in exile from a country she and her family had to flee for their safety carries its own confinement. But the novel builds far more nuance than that reading alone would suggest, as Dilara finds herself drawn back into this cell again and again, encountering guards and more and more prisoners, even as she keeps stepping back out into her ordinary life caring for her father in Italy.
Caregiving and the Loss of Memory
There are so many harrowing, heart-rending scenes of her father's decline, and the novel occasionally slides into second person when addressing the larger experience of caregiving directly, as though reaching out to any reader who has lived through something similar: the emotional toll of watching someone you love become a husk of who they were, and the way that tragedy doesn't erase the ordinary, complicated tensions that were already present in a family. There's a lovely, devastating image of family love as a kind of orbit, everyone circling each other in connection and familiarity without ever fully touching, and the novel asks what happens to that orbit once the shared memories holding it together start to disappear. Dilara herself starts losing her grip on her own memories under the sheer exhaustion and stress of caregiving; there's a striking moment where she vividly recalls a family gathering, certain that photographs exist of it, only to find the actual photos show something quite different from what she remembers.
The story doesn't shy away from the practical wreckage either: dwindling money, her husband eventually leaving after the Turkish cell triggers real fear that their old government has somehow found them, and Dilara left alone, unable to find work despite once having been a practicing child psychologist. Her sense of her own identity grows slippery too, especially once her father begins mistaking her for her own mother, who died suddenly years earlier, a contrast that throws the slow, grinding nature of his decline into sharp relief.
Exile, Language, and Nationhood
There's a poignant nostalgia woven through the sections set in the cell, particular tastes and objects such as coffee and marzipan that briefly transport Dilara back to Turkey before slipping away again, a past she can never fully recover. That resonated with me personally, as someone who has lived outside my own native country for my entire adult life; a certain sensation can transport me back there in my mind but whenever I return to the United States now it's a genuinely different place from the one I left. For Dilara, that displacement is sharpened by real political danger back home, and the novel captures how ordinary people get swept into extraordinary circumstances almost without realising it, including one darkly funny aside about a relative bringing unpaid parking tickets to a protest just to find a policeman to sort them out. Language becomes another marker of that drift: Dilara and her husband mostly speak Italian together, and she finds herself forgetting Turkish words, only reconnecting with the language inside the cell itself, talking with guards and prisoners. Her father, meanwhile, keeps repeating one phrase throughout the book, insisting that what he's experiencing "is not correct," a line that works on the level of his own disorientation but also as a much larger judgment on the state of his home country and his family.
Verdict
I connected with this novel on some simpler levels too, like Dilara's friends back in Istanbul teasing her for only ever reading depressing literary fiction, which is very much my own reading diet. But beyond that, what struck me most is how the book extends the idea of imprisonment well past its literal setting: when someone is caught in circumstances entirely outside their control, they can become a kind of prison cell themselves. There’s a tension throughout about whether Dilara might literally be in a Turkish prison cell and her life in Italy is purely an escapist fantasy. I found real echoes in this novel of Kafka and Beckett, but most powerfully of Georgi Gospodinov's “Time Shelter”, in how both novels braid together the experience of dementia with a country's oppressive political history. For anyone who has cared for a family member, partner, or friend through Alzheimer's, I'd also strongly recommend Sam Mills's memoir “The Fragments of My Father”, which captures the physical, emotional, and financial toll of that experience in unflinching detail.
I was genuinely so impressed by the nuance and complexity with which this novel handles memory and identity, and by how strongly it resonated with me. Orhan previously published a short story collection, and I understand this novel actually grew out of one of those stories, which makes me want to go back and read that prior book. If you've read this one, or have other recommendations of literature that grapples honestly with Alzheimer's and caregiving, I'd love to hear about it.
