Amid the surreal setup of a bathroom / prison cell, Kenan Orhan’s novel reflects on history, family and exile
The renovation in question is of an ensuite bathroom; it’s botched to the extent that what Dilara, the client, gets instead is a prison cell. In Silivri Prison in Istanbul. Which she can walk in and out of through the door in her bedroom in Italy. Where she, a native of the Turkish city, lives in political exile. The renovation then becomes a space in which certain truths come out. In the prison/bathroom (where she is both a prisoner and not, conversing with the guards and, eventually, with other inmates) she feels ‘warmed and comforted’ because she can speak Turkish. She can also run to it when caring for her father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and is the reason for their exile from Turkey (‘a dissident academic with a history of imprisonment’ who gets blacklisted, along with his daughter, under the state of emergency and purges that followed the failed 2016 coup against Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), gets to be too much. As the subtly membranous novel progresses, so the prison cell’s hold over Dilara grows. The experience of living in prison seems no more frightening than living outside it in Turkey, where ‘it wasn’t so bad… despite the coup attempt, the mass purges and roundups and trials, getting fired’.
This surreal setup becomes a launchpad for meditations on how the effects of the past are ongoing, and whether or not one can ever be divorced from the present; what it takes to make a home; the limits of family responsibilities; and what it means to leave one hostile land and language and attempt to immerse yourself in, at times, a no less hostile other. Through it all Kenan Orhan maintains a sense of lightness and humour: ‘What is your greatest strength?’ a questionnaire asks Dilara as she searches for a job. ‘The time I lifted my father completely off the floor,’ she writes in reply. It’s this ability to mix the light with the heavy, the personal and the political that makes this novel by turns touching and profound.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan. Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 (hardcover)
From the Spring 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
