The Renovation by Kenan Orhan: Important and funny but it doesn’t quite land
Kenan Orhan's novel 'The Renovation' explores the themes of exile, Alzheimer's, and political oppression through the story of a Turkish woman living in Italy. While the reviewer praises the book's political acuity and writing style, they feel the narrative ultimately fails to fully resonate.
Why it matters
Literary criticism provides cultural context for contemporary fiction, helping readers navigate complex themes of migration and political trauma.
In The Renovation we meet Dilara, who, with her Alzheimer’s-suffering father and neurotic husband, lives in a small flat in Italy after fleeing Erdogan ’s increasingly constrictive regime in Turkey.
The novel begins when what was supposed to be a new bathroom is instead transformed into a cell in a women’s prison in Turkey. And so we’re given, with this tidy little legerdemain, the split-self experience of the exile. Dilara exists in two prisons, that of her life as an exile, and the actual prison she knows she would have ended up in had she never left.
This is skilfully aligned with the situation of Alzheimer’s, and of grief. It is so skilful, in fact, that the novel has that dizzying effect of seeming to be laden with too much understated meaning to be fully comprehensible.
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