Review: 'White on White,' by Aysegul Savas

In her 2019 debut, "Walking on the Ceiling," Aysegul Savas deftly probed the barriers inherent to human relationships, particularly how they are revealed when we try to inhabit another person's story.

The novel, meted out in bite-sized chapters, centers on the connections that Nunu, a young woman studying literature in Paris, has with an older male author and with her mother. The platonic friendship with the author delves into issues of appropriation, artistic inspiration and public versus private personas.

The mother-daughter relationship is more freighted and, for Nunu, more difficult to convey, a difficulty starkly revealed in a late chapter that reads, in its entirety: "I'm trying to say that I've tried to tell a story about her many times. But none have resembled my mother."

Savas' luxuriantly meditative new novel, "White on White," again zeroes in on these elemental interpersonal themes. And perhaps with an eye to Nunu's inability to render her mother, Savas has written a confessional novel where a painter named Agnes tells her own story, albeit indirectly, by spilling her past cares and current fears to the book's unnamed narrator, who passes them on to the reader with no filter and few judgments.

This chronicler of Agnes' life is a young woman, closer in age to Agnes' children than to Agnes herself, writing her graduate thesis on medieval attitudes toward nudity, as revealed through Gothic artworks. She has earned a yearlong fellowship to an unspecified city — likely in Italy or Spain, given the area's geography and relevant cathedrals — and has rented a flat owned by Agnes and her husband.

After two months, Agnes comes to town to work in her art studio on the flat's upper floor. The narrator finds Agnes' presence magnetic as the two discuss art, both Agnes' paintings and the sculptures the narrator is researching. Agnes extends her stay and begins to share more personal stories, both quotidian and intimate, covering everything from how often she thought about a painting that hung in her childhood home to the first time she has sex — with an art school instructor, an experience she saw dispassionately as "a task, a destination she'd set her mind on."

At first, the narrator wonders at Agnes' ever-lengthening separation from her husband, but soon she grows more concerned with finding her own separation from the woman. For her part, Agnes is keenly aware of her need for companionship from their first outing, when she says, "I seem to be starved for conversation. I'm going on and on."

The narrator's research into the historic ties between touch and narrative is almost unwittingly fueled by Agnes' compulsion to bare herself metaphorically. While we see the "physical aspect" of nakedness the same as it has been for centuries, our current "perception of being unclothed might hold entirely different meanings, like a thin film obscuring the subject from view."

The many correlations between that "thin film" and the "pleasingly thin" Agnes, so desperate to have someone slip inside her skin and understand her, make Savas' lyrically spare gem shimmer with richly complex insights on communication, family, love and friendship.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer and editor.

White on White

By: Aysegul Savas.

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 192 pages, $26.