New Yorker Fiction Review #315: "Marseille" by Aysegul Savas
Turkish novelist Aysegul Savas is in the midst of a highly enviable run of literary success. Since 2019, Savas -- who, it should be noted, received her MFA in the U.S. and writes in English -- has published three novels, a collection of non-fiction essays, and has a short story collection due out in July. Not to mention short stories and essays published in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Dublin Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, and others. And her third novel, The Anthropologists (2024), was cited by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year...which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.
The point is, other than winning the Pulitzer Prize or the Pen Hemingway Award, or having one of her books turned into a movie (and hey, there's still plenty of time), as a young writer of literary fiction you could not ask for a better career. According to the internet, Savas is still in her late 30s which, in the literary world, makes her a baby.
As for my relationship to her work, this is now the third short story I've read of hers in The New Yorker, which is the sum total of my exposure to her prose. Her short story "Notions of the Sacred," from the Jan. 2 & 9, 2023 issue, impressed me a lot more than did the first one I ever read, back in 2021. So, I suppose you could say she's growing on me. Although "Marseille" -- about three girlfriends on vacation in that French city -- doesn't carry quite the same weight as "Notions of the Sacred" -- about a pair of women going through their pregnancies together -- the two stories share some broader thematic elements that also connect to Savas's wider body of work. She mentions, for example, that when she was pregnant people opened up to her a lot more, as though pregnancy conferred special powers of forgiveness; this is directly tied to some of the themes in "Notions of the Sacred."
"Marseille" covers a few days in which three college friends -- Amina, Alba, and Lisa, now in their early/mid-30s -- take a long weekend trip to Marseille, France. Geographically, this is easily accomplished because they all live in Western Europe. Schedule-wise the trip is complicated because Amina (the main character) now has a one-year-old child. Amina's child is a concrete manifestation of a truth that is slowly dawning on all three women and which looms in the background of their weekend like a lengthening shadow: time is passing and their youth is fading away. This occurs to them during the trip, like it occurs to all of us, slowly and in small ways. The story does not "conclude" so much as fade out.
Motherhood, feminine power (read: sexuality), and aging, are all themes Savas deals with in this story. From very early in the story we understand that Amina -- the first to have a child -- feels a sense of unease at how her newfound motherhood will affect her friendship with the others. In fact, it seems she almost feels guilty for disrupting the bond of friendship and young, single womanhood they had.
"...their friendship had always operated in leisure: long meals, afternoon drinks, dressing up to go dancing. Amina wanted to see them on these same terms, rather than be disappointed by interrupted conversations and her friends' possible lack of interest in her daughter."
But here is the kicker...in the immediately following line:
"She herself had never paid attention to friends' babies before; she only surveyed the mothers. She noted the physical changes, their waning interests, trying to project what might become of her in the future were she to have a child."
These lines give us most of what we need to unpack this story. The difference is that now Amina is no longer watching young mothers from the sidelines, she herself is one, so now she's observing the changes to her own life and observing herself as "other" in relation to her two single friends, Alba and Lisa. She's also watching their youth and sexual power wane.
The chief "plot incident" -- we might call it -- in the story is that Alba, who has always been the most confident and sexually assertive -- gets the phone number of their waiter, Vincent, and attempts to set up a date with him for after dinner. But the date never happens. Alba and Vincent exchange text messages. The three friends attempt, unsuccessfully, to secure a table, and then seats at the bar, of a restaurant, and end up having to leave. Vincent texts Alba that he's sorry, but he cannot meet her that night.
Quite obviously, Savas intends this incident as a way to show how Alba and the group as a whole, are aging. There is the idea that, were they younger, Alba might have been able to pull Vincent away from whatever he was doing. In the world of these three friends, you get the sense that's happened before. Now, the age and attractiveness of the friends might have nothing to do with why Alba's date never happened, but the point is they are old enough now not to know for sure.
"And perhaps this had dawned on all of them, like an answer, though they hadn't realized until then that there'd been a question. It had never been a question, not yet. It was still their turn.
'Oh my God,' Lisa said. 'What if...what if he thought we were just a bunch of aunties?'"
It's as though the very question: "Am I getting old?" is what causes your youth to be over. It's a fascinating idea, driven home in the story by the fact that the friends decide to buy one last bottle of wine for a "nightcap," only to remember that they never drank the bottle of wine they'd bought for a nightcap the night before. The three probably have many decades of friendship and many girls trips left in them, but it is the beginning of the end of their youth, and deep down the they all know it.
One line I particularly liked was when the three meet a young woman on a ferryboat who is on her post-university year of traveling. Savas writes that:
"She was still young enough that she could sum up her life in a continuous narrative."
I like this because it carries with it the implication that, if you live long enough, your life takes enough unexpected turns and unfolds in a way that makes so little sense to you at times, that you lose the ability to sum it up as one continuous story. I think it's very subtly wise, and funny.
Illustration by Virginie Morgand
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