Walking on the Ceiling

1.

For a short time when I lived in Paris, I was friends with the writer M. He was a foreigner to the city, too, which may have been one reason for our friendship. We went on walks around the city and we wrote to each other.
What remains of that time is a photograph of M. standing in front of a marble wall, looking at me with bewildered eyes. Above his raised eyebrow, a pale and jagged scar rises, deepens, disappears.
Actually, this may not be a scar at all, but a trick of the shadows, or the author's face folded with age. I do not recall a scar from our walks, but I often walked alongside him with my head down. And I'm not sure whether his eyes are really cast up in surprise, as I said, and not simply with impatience at having his photo taken.
Still, I remember M. as always a bit bewildered, and with the scar on his eyebrow-a sign illuminated in that brief moment of documentation when he looked me straight in the eyes.
But here, too, my account is faulty, since between my eyes and his stood the comforting length of the camera lens. As far as I can remember, I never looked M. in the eyes, even when we were seated across from each other at a café.
Some days, it's difficult to believe that this friendship really existed-with its particular logic, its detachment from the world. What I remember has the texture of a dream, an invention, a strange and weightless suspension, like walking on the ceiling.
In my childhood, I would hold a square mirror up to the ceiling. I examined every inch of this flat, white expanse, entirely removed from the jagged world on the opposite pole where people lived in shadows, weighed down by troubles. I understood that all anyone can do in the midst of darkness is retreat to their own, bright landscapes.

I think more and more these days that I should set down some of the facts of my friendship with M., to keep something of this time intact. But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When

Ay egül Sava grew up in Turkey and Denmark. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, and elsewhere, and was shortlisted for the Glimmer Train Fiction Prize and the Graywolf Emerging Writers Award. She has an MFA from the University of San Francisco. She teaches at the Sorbonne and lives in Paris.

[A] delicate, melancholy debut novel... The unreliability of memory; the ways we talk to ourselves and to each other; how we can act as detectives in our own lives, combing the past for clues; how places can seem clearer from afar than when we are there all these themes are touched on in Savas s spare, disarmingly simple prose. She writes with both sensuality and coolness, as if determined to find a rational explanation for the irrationality of existence, and for the narrator s opaque understanding of herself.
Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

"[A] beguiling little novel... going out for a stroll is the activity that most resembles the reading of Sava s book the way people and places are observed in passing, captured in short discreet word photographs that form a sweet, sad meditative ramble.
The New York Times Book Review

"[A]n original, mesmerising story.... [A] beguiling tale of two cities which expertly illuminates 'the devious ways of memory.'"
The Economist

[T]he kind of novel that stuns you in a way both quiet and surprising, launching you into reveries of your own.  
Nylon Magazine

Ay egül Sava is an enormous new talent who writes with the rigor of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald. Walking on the Ceiling holds the immediacy of youth and the depth of long-earned wisdom at once. Its elegant voice is sure to summon old memories and longings from each reader, relighting them anew.
Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers

In Walking on the Ceiling, Aysegul Savas investigates the inability of any story to accurately evoke lived experience yet her unconventional narrative succeeds in doing just that. Savas s celebration of the minutest details of Paris and Istanbul is juxtaposed, to devastating effect, against rising political tensions. This quietly intense debut is the product of a wise and probing mind.
Helen Phillips, author of The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat