Chasing Memory: A Review of Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas

Unreliable narrators abound in literary criticism. They are certainly no stranger to graduate seminars, where suspicious reading approaches interrogate what lies beneath and beyond the text. Yet Aysegül Savas’s Walking on the Ceiling transforms this uncertainty into a novel of longing and self-creation—a subtler tribute to Joan Didion’s insistence that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nunu, a Turkish woman recounting her experiences in Paris and Istanbul, acknowledges embellishments and failures of memory. Far from a stale device, these distortions offer compelling glimpses into her psyche and motives. Even as Nunu upends the traditional writer/muse dynamic after meeting a British author—described only as M.—in Paris, she confronts her mother’s complex legacy.

The brief chapters that populate Walking on the Ceiling, some only a sentence long, fit well with Nunu’s early warning. Though she will “set down some of the facts” of her friendship with the writer M.,“stories are reckless things…When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind.” Large amounts of white space confirm this observation, creating room for what remains unsaid. Nunu’s friendship with M. reveals a similar dynamic; she becomes his de facto guide to Turkish culture. Meeting M. after a bookshop reading, she ingratiates herself with him as they trade impressions of Istanbul.

At first glance, we seem headed for an old story: a well-known male writer becomes fascinated with a younger woman. This initial take proves deceptive, however. M. admires Nunu as a perceived insider, praising her mastery of the Turkish language and intimate knowledge of Istanbul, but she may be the outsider and creator of the two. Though she remembers her mother fondly when speaking with M., she does not share less picturesque aspects of her childhood, including her father’s suicide. Nunu claims she is working on a novel about “Akif amca,” her mother’s former neighbor with western ties. While she assures M. that Akif amca was a great but undiscovered poet, she reveals elsewhere that she finds his writings to be “amateurish” and “didactic.” These fabrications seem typical of her interactions with others, as she convinced one former boyfriend that she was abused. But Nunu grows increasingly uncomfortable with their correspondence, accusing M. of using her as a “jukebox” of ready-made stories. Readers are left with the impression of an intriguing social chameleon, curating her self-image for every person she meets.

As the dynamic between the two unfolds, it becomes clear that this fractured, non-chronological narration is more than an end in itself. Nunu’s brief anecdotes about being a woman adrift in Paris feel especially poignant. Horrified when she orders a hot chocolate with steak tartare, an arrogant waiter mocks her when she dares to ask for a takeout box: “Sure…You can have it for breakfast, with a hot chocolate.” Not since Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight have I read a novel that captures the embarrassment and disorientation of a grieving expatriate so effectively. However uneven these reflections may be, a core emerges quickly: Nunu’s late mother. When her mother dies after an illness, she collects the remembrances, nostalgia, anger, and resentment that defined their relationship, attempting to form a cohesive story. But with each turn of this narrative kaleidoscope, her mother’s image keeps changing. She is alternately an eccentric, according to her sisters; a cold manipulator who ignores her husband’s despair; a distant mother grappling with family tragedy; and a sick woman desperate to reconnect with her daughter. Their failed attempts at connection are stark. As a child after her father’s death, Nunu plays what she calls the “silence game,” finding ways to give her mother space while claiming she is the one who needs solitude. Later, when her mother is eager to become closer, she uses that silence for rejection. Throughout Walking on the Ceiling, Nunu frets about the “damage” words can cause and the loss they incur, but it is clear that she cannot cast off the various lenses that color her memories.

Walking on the Ceiling adopts the well-worn tactic of unreliable narration with empathy and originality. Its elegiac prose confronts loss and emptiness with a deceptively muted tone, inviting readers to face the hollowness, inconsistency, but ultimate necessity of storytelling.