Over three days in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris , in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that... See more

She has come to see, too, the universal in the specific. “All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park,” she says. “I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges,... See more

Why is this important? Because, Perec argued, if we can learn how to “speak of these ‘common things,’” which he describes as “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious . . . the background noise, the habitual,” we can stop doing what we default to, which is to “sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.” Instead, we can give the fundamental elements... See more

If anthropology proved less than revelatory in that case, or rather if what it revealed was only that globalization and technology have made ways of being across cultures increasingly generic, the discipline has equipped Asya with a way to organize her thoughts about the world, which, we learn, has long been useful in making sense of a life without... See more

Bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on her life also makes it clear to Asya that our lives need rituals, which give them meaning and bind us together, as do the rituals that she and Manu have established: “While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across... See more

“[mistrust] the woman’s process of abstraction, simply because I’d grown weary of life in the abstract. For most of the people we were acquainted with, Manu and I were nothing more than our countries of origin, our accents, our work. And I yearned for a specific existence.”

So anthropology grounds Asya. At the same time, the novel gestures to the discipline’s troubled past, with its colonial underpinnings and tendency to exploit, extract, and other its subjects.

Small does not mean inconsequential. These small things are, of course, life itself, and when attended to, become as large as each of our lives is to us.

“I found my subjects self-explanatory, if not a little disappointing. . . . It was just life, in a somewhat ugly town. There were afternoon snacks of Fanta and stale vanilla cake. The children that came to the center wore sneakers and had cell phones. They listened to the same pop songs as the rest of the world.”