Anika Strite
Book Review
A review of Aysegül Savaș’ Long Distance (Bloomsbury). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
In his essay, “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” Oblique, meaning angular, non-parallel; casual, meaning random, but also unpredictable, inexplicably violent.
We don’t normally think of cruelty as casual; we think of it as planned, pre-meditated. It’s easier this way, in a psychological sense, to disallow the possibility that wounding can occur without intention. There is no way that I, a good person, can be cruel without noticing, right?
In terms of scale, there is large-scale cruelty in the form of extreme violence, state-inflicted oppression, war, though there are many better terms to describe these events (acts of atrocity, brutality, barbarism). There is also large-scale cruelty on the interpersonal level: domestic violence, betrayal, harassment. What about small-scale cruelty that exists in the minor details of exchange between persons, cruelty that surfaces daily?
In her collection of short stories, Long Distance, published in July 2025, Ayșegül Savaș reminds us that each and every person is capable of harm, that we are all culpable, in a way, of wounding each other. The collection contains thirteen stories with female protagonists; often women who are voluntarily displaced, in other words, expats. Savaș herself is an expat: she is Turkish-American, but lives in Paris. Two of the stories have been published previously: “Long Distance” and “Future Selves,” the latter which inspired Savaș’ 2024 novel, The Anthropologists.
Though deeply interior in terms of narration, Long Distance is heavily invested in the big and, one could say, universal, problems of our time. In “Twirl,” Savaș does the brave thing of addressing the digital age. A woman decides to delve into online dating after failing to meet someone naturally, inspiring “something close to panic.” It is deeply relatable, and equally sobering, to observe the impotence of the modern person attempting to connect with others. This desire is so strong that we resort to objectively horrible things like dating apps that promise… what? Nothing profound, probably not. It is this absence of stakes that Savaș deals with in “Twirl,” the weight of the weightlessness, where to place responsibility and the guilt that follows from the theater of it all. At the end of a date, one man twirls the narrator rather unexpectedly. She is touched by this gesture, until she learns how impersonal it probably was. She then must negotiate her own individuality in a landscape of movements dictated by scripts.
The idea of real connection being impossible is not exactly new. Being an occupation of the modernists, it has been around for at least a century. Let us recall Hemingway, for example. The characters in The Sun Also Rises want so badly to love, but they are all wounded from the war. Hemingway however, was mainly focused on the (figurative) castration of men (though Brett is similarly affected into passivity). If we look to Fitzgerald, Daisy is also unable to act, having to mediate her desires through material goods (“They’re such beautiful shirts!”). What matters though, is not how the female characters of male modernists are actually more complex than they are given credit for, but how Hemingway and Fitzgerald are seen as masculinist America’s best authors. Savaș’s narrators are all women, but they face the same issues: passivity and impotence, being unable to act, to get beneath the surface, being wounded and capable of wounding.
On the surface, nothing is outright grotesque. The stories capture mostly ordinary, innocent situations: a pair of long-distance lovers reunite, the childhood friend of a writer living in Paris has a layover there, a couple searches for a new apartment together. First person narration can be grating in its restrictiveness. Savaș’ is not. Her use of voice is extremely attentive to detail, but not only in scenic description. Savaș’ voice twinges, winces, and paints thought, creating a running thread of careless callousness weaving throughout each story. It is the way that this manifests, in how the characters hurt each other and how easily it happens, that is shocking and most compelling. In “Marseille,” three friends go on a girls trip where they try to pretend that everything hasn’t changed— time, that is. Savaș delicately presents each narrator’s sometimes irrational and endearingly human expectations– that romantic attention will be reciprocated even when one has become an older woman, or that one’s less accomplished childhood friend will not be so happy with her life. It would be impossible for me to extract just an example, for it is built into the whole book, this dual construction and deconstruction of expectations, hopes, and desires.
Sometimes the narrators seem bad– the expat writer, for example, eager to demonstrate her superiority over her friend due to having left their hometown, is surprised to find her friend happier than she is in her adult life. Savaș does not make any ethical judgments though, she simply presents the situation through the narrator’s observations, reactions, and mental processes. And it is all so human– don’t we all want to feel proud of ourselves? To feel as though the hard things we have done were all worth it? And how to do that but to press our images of ourselves up against those of other people?
Having an anthropological background, it is no surprise Savaș has such skill observing and documenting human behavior. She is sophisticated too, demonstrating knowledge of European art and languages, but without being pushy: “Lara complimented them on this, showed enthusiastic approval in the banal, repeated facts of art history– that Michelangelo freed the human form from blocks of marble, that Rodin had taken credit for the work of his lover, that Cézanne had truly paved the way to Cubism.” Her soft delivery retains a sharpness without directional impulse.
The best art makes us aware; of our arrogance, and also our innocence. It is arrogant for us to assume we know everything, that we even know ourselves. That our knowledge of ourselves will allow us to bypass the infliction of harm. It is arrogant to assume our innocence, but it is equally true that we are innocent in the sense that wounding is larger than the individual, that it is a universal experience, and we must all submit to the reality that is its inevitability. But let us not throw all agency to the wind; Savaș’ work simply urges us to be cognizant. After all, resigning individual will has historically enabled mass violence. Here is the difference between being submissive to life, and subjugating oneself to a machine: I am a small thing in a big moving mass, but I am also important to something equally small.
Long Distance
Aysegül Savaș
Bloomsbury Publishing
240pp
$24
Anika Strite studies literature, French, and history at Barnard College. In addition to works of criticism, she writes fiction and poetry. She edits for L’Esprit Literary Review and the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism. She is currently working on her first novella.
L'Esprit Literary Review 