Two young expats are searching for a flat, as a way to start building their real life, it seems. A life that happens in a city where they have no family and difficulties finding genuine friends. The novel threads through Asya who is filming people in the park nearby, their dinners with an old woman to whom they read poetry, visiting flats they can afford and going out with a few friends. So they spend time talking, drinking, rethinking the world. I was very touched by the ton in the book and the pain and resilience of families that are living throughout the world. So many beautiful sentences, I had difficulties choosing one.
“During my interviews at the park, I was mesmerized by the routines of strangers: I wanted to ask questions that burrowed deeper into the fabric of a single day. As I continued filming, I was also beginning to articulate a feeling I’d had, dormant, for a long time. Everyone, it seemed to me, had something truly weird about them, something unique and bizarre. This uniqueness was most apparent in everyday acts, in the banal rather than the extraordinary: the way they picked clothes for the day, the things they ate, how they spent a free hour. This was their compass, it seemed to me, more so than any moral abstraction.”