The Renovation

This short novel follows Turkish expatriate Dilara, who lives in an Italian village with her elderly Father and her hypochondriac Husband. Wanting to renovate their bathroom, the couple hire a group of workmen, although Dilara feels uneasy around them from the start. She does not want to keep checking on their work, but later regrets this decision when, at the end of the renovation, she realises that her bathroom no longer exists. In its place, she finds a prison cell belonging to the notorious Turkish Silivri Prison, a discovery she makes thanks to a passing guard who mistakes her for an inmate. The cell is now physically connected to her home, allowing Dilara to move freely between the two spaces—especially since the prison’s director and guards appear absent-minded and largely uninterested in the prisoners’ fate.

At first, Dilara is incredulous. When she tries to confront the builder, however, he remains evasive and claims he cannot understand her properly because of her accent. Indeed, Dilara, her Husband, and her Father moved to Italy seven years earlier, in 2017. Back in Turkey, Dilara worked as a child psychologist, but she was unable to find employment in their small Italian village or to have her qualifications recognised. Her Husband, an accountant, was instead able to continue working. Eventually, Dilara decided to become a full-time carer for her Father. Initially, he lived in a nearby flat, but as his condition worsened, he moved in with the couple.

The ageing academic suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and throughout the novel, as Dilara quite literally travels back and forth between Italy and Turkey, she reflects on her memories of him. In addition to his academic career, he had enjoyed modest success as a writer and was a fierce opponent of Erdogan’s regime, frequently clashing with those in power. The decline of his cognitive abilities appears to be tied to major political events in Turkey. It began in 2013, during mass protests that were violently repressed by Erdogan’s government. During that period, Dilara’s Father started confusing the names of political parties—something he had never done before. After he fell and injured himself, Dilara took him to the hospital, but he was not diagnosed with dementia. Instead, Dilara and her aunts convinced themselves that the changes were temporary, even as he began forgetting small things and occasionally calling Dilara by her late mother’s name.