Review: White on White
By Aziza Kasumov
Ayşegül Savaş’s novel White on White, published December 7th of this week, functions like a Russian doll. Throughout the story, an unnamed narrator cracks open one doll after the next for us, revealing evermore intricate renderings of her subject of observation, until we get to some—possibly crystallized—core.
White on White is the second novel of Turkish writer Savaş, who now lives in Paris, but it doesn’t quite provide the material for her to definitively distinguish her writing as a literary class of its own. The novel brings, instead, a different kind of artistic power to the table; the game of anticipation and reveal may be enough to carry the story. But the lack of introspection of the very person cracking open all those dolls also strips Savaş of exactly those scenes that, in her earlier work, have delivered her most proficient writing.
In the novel, an unnamed student moves to an unnamed city to study Gothic nudes of the twelfth and thirteenth century, renting an apartment—sparse yet “marked with life, rich and varied”—from a professor who’s offering the space up at a favorable rate. The only hook to the deal: the professor’s wife, a painter named Agnes, might come and stay in a studio room in the apartment during brief visits to the city from time to time.
Not too long into the student’s stay, Agnes arrives, radiating a striking, captivating charm. During a series of encounters and dates, inside and outside of the apartment’s walls, Agnes begins to tell the student about her past, meditating on friendships that fizzled, the children she raised, the idea of white-on-white paintings she’s exploring in her work, and her marriage. As Agnes keeps extending her stay, her monologues take on an increasingly intense character, resembling something not quite performance, not quite self-portraiture.
The content of these monologues, along with the protagonist’s cool-toned, matter-of-fact style of narration, comes off as almost hypnotic. Watching a woman slowly lose grip of her self-composure may not be a pretty thing, betraying any societal expectations of keeping her loss of control under the wraps of a defying smile. But it also has a certain shocking, can’t-look-away effect to it—we can’t stop indulging ourselves in the progression of disaster, observing it from the sidelines in a trance-like state, without any overwhelming wish to interfere.
Seeing Agnes unravel herself from the student’s perspective removes us, as readers, one step away from the subject of interest, but the second-handedness of Savaş’s narrative structure also confirms, or perhaps informs, our growing eeriness toward Agnes as the novel progresses. It’s effective in that we never question how the narrative unfolds; we are patiently but eagerly awaiting as our narrator passes along whatever new stories Agnes has chosen to reveal. If Agnes instead were the narrator of the novel, her seemingly sudden realization that her “life has fallen apart” as the story draws to its end would feel somewhat like a betrayal: We wouldn’t have seen it coming. But Agnes should’ve.
While Savaş, in White on White, writes in the popular contemporary style of the sparse, emotionally detached narrator, her first novel, Walking on the Ceiling, published in 2019, shows that her writing can stand as its own literary tradition. In her debut, Savaş deploys her protagonist Nunu’s friendship with a male writer as the jumping-off point for a weighty introspection, reflecting on various episodes from Nunu’s past.
Sections in Walking on the Ceiling that capture Nunu’s childhood in Turkey are where Savaş’s clean, powerful prose sings in its most wonderful pitch. Her sober language meets children’s games and adolescent disappointments, giving the writing a mystical, dream-like texture that’s simple and wrenchingly beautiful at once. But while she picks up the same clear-cut tone for White on White, its effect appears more muted, because she resists contrasting the sparse language with the narrator’s account of her own drama-slash-trauma. The detached tone only serves as an overlay for Agnes’s retelling of episodes from her past, which softens the juxtaposition between clean prose and the heavy matters that make up all of life.
White on White still has a mesmerizing voice, even though it’s less of an emotional punch in the gut. Instead, it’s hypnotic, drawing us in further and further as Agnes peels back the layers of her personal anguish. Beyond that, the novel’s musings on the role of nude Gothic sculptures in the Middle Ages, an era when life was centered around “the brief interval between states of nudity,” fascinatingly allow the reader to trace the students’ investigation into why a society so insistent on covering the body in layers of clothing, choses, in some works of art, to expose it.
As White on White approaches its climax, the student, in a striking moment of indulging herself in an unusually direct, mid-conversation weigh-in, asks, ”wasn’t it true of all art . . . that its power lay as much in absence, in the deliberate choice of what was left out, as in what was revealed?” Perhaps, the reason why Savaş’s prose in White on White comes with less of a punch than in her debut is that so much of the novel bypasses the introspection of the narrator; allowing us to focus, without distraction, on Agnes. It’s almost as if the narrator has no inner life at all. Maybe that’s why White on White can feel so entrancing. When you look for the heart of the prose, you find it in a place you don’t expect.
About the author
Aziza Kasumov
Aziza Kasumov spent the past several years working as a business reporter, before enrolling in Columbia University’s creative writing MFA program, focusing on fiction, in the summer of 2021. Her non-fiction work has been published in the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Vice, The Hollywood Reporter and Politico.