Types of memory
Notes from Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation...
Notes from novels are my personal approach to book reviews, based on close reading of quotes and critical articles. I pull out the lines I underlined while reading and use them as jumping-off points to explore what made a book stick with me. Sometimes there’s a clear theme; other times I just follow where the quotes take me.
This Week: The Renovation, Kenan Orhan
I was kindly sent an early copy to review for an online magazine I write for. Sadly the magazine had to close before I could publish it. So here, before I dive into the quotes, is my review of Orhan’s debut novel.
The Renovation is an impressive first book. Though it has been labelled magical realism, that label feels slightly underwhelming. Yes, the premise is surreal: the narrator’s newly renovated bathroom is now a prison cell. But what follows feels far less whimsical than the term might suggest. The novel reads more like a dystopian thriller, propelled by tension and unease rather than dreamlike symbolism. It is quite Kafkaesque.
“This book is dedicated to caregivers” Orhan writes in the opening dedication. It is an understated line that quietly frames everything that follows: a story about grief, responsibility, and familial duty. Through the life of Dilara, a Turkish political exile living in Italy because of her father’s past, Orhan traces the intimate consequences of political upheaval. The novel follows a family grappling with exile, Alzheimer’s, and the psychological toll both place on the protagonist.
The story begins with Dilara’s startling discovery. The renovated bathroom contains the unmistakable features of a prison cell: a metal toilet, the stark architecture of confinement, a guard. The cell mirrors the real-life Silivri Prison, a site associated with political imprisonment in modern Turkey. The novel unfolds between these two worlds. As Dilara begins visiting the mysterious cell and speaking to women who seem to come from the homeland she left behind, the boundaries between memory, guilt, and reality blur.
These visits become more frequent as her father’s condition worsens. Caregiving becomes both a physical and emotional burden, complicated by the knowledge that much of her displacement traces back to his political actions. In this sense the novel is as much about family responsibility as it is about political history.
What makes it especially compelling is Orhan’s prose. The writing is fluid and propulsive, turning even the most surreal moments into scenes that feel emotionally immediate. The reader never doubts that the prison in the bathroom is real. It is the kind of book where you find yourself underlining something on nearly every page. As a debut it is exceptional: a haunting meditation on caregiving, displacement, and the ways in which private family life is shaped by the broader forces of history.
I devoured this novel and I hope the review above shows that. For a debut it was incredible, and where dystopian fiction can sometimes feel too schematic, Orhan’s novel slotted together with a quiet precision. For this week’s notes I have selected three quotes about memory: personal memory, cultural memory, and the particular grief of watching someone lose theirs.
“What is the weight of a memory?”
Some memories flee and others linger. Some feel heavy and others light. Memory holds no physical mass and yet it can alter the posture of a life.
We tend to think of grief as a heavy memory because it pulls the past into the present with an abrupt, physical force. I lost my grandfather six years ago to cancer. I no longer grieve every day the way I did when he first died, but there are these sudden moments where I am projected back into a memory of him and my energy simply drains. The weight of a memory, I think, is not about information but about attachment. I mourn the loss of my rabbit more than the loss of an old goldfish.
“Possibilities are limited when a country organises its memory.”
The narrator has been exiled from Turkey, largely because of her father’s past. She therefore has a complicated relationship with her homeland, one that is not entirely her own to define.
Collective memory is rarely neutral. A country organises its memory through school curricula, monuments, and media, deciding which stories are foregrounded and which are quietly forgotten. Until relatively recently the UK was not examined clearly for its colonial past. It took the colonised to bring this to light, and education has only slowly begun to pivot.
“When I was in the cell, I didn’t hate my father; he was removed from me, restored to that respectable distance of love. I thought that’s what love was in families: it was an orbit. Whereas consuming or erotic love was always a collision, an obliteration of the distinct selves into a new coupled whole, other kinds of love naturally remained on the periphery of our lives.”
Living with a father whose memory is disappearing becomes harder each day for the narrator. It is easier, then, to remember him than to exist alongside him. Removed from the pressures of daily interaction, he can be restored to something more tender and symbolic: a reconstruction of the person she once knew, held at the distance that love in families so often requires.