Admittedly, Americans seem to have a soft spot for books about faraway places that end up reminding them of themselves. Hansen’s, though, is in many ways too rich and complex to provide an easy parallel. Erdogan often gets lumped in with other 21st-century strongmen, but on migration, for example, he has taken an idiosyncratic tack. “Unlike Trump and Orban,” Hansen writes, referring to Hungary’s then prime minister, “Erdogan had seen the Syrians as part of his vision for a greater Muslim Turkey, rather than brown invaders of a white Western country.” His approach to immigration also allowed him to play a kind of power broker on the world stage, collecting European Union money to keep the Syrians out of Europe.

Much of what Hansen found in Karagumruk surprised her, too. Residents would complain relentlessly about their new Syrian neighbors while providing them with generous aid. She spoke with countless Karagumruk residents while necessarily directing our attention to a few. Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman, speaks lovingly of the city’s old cosmopolitanism and happens to be part of the same midcentury generation as Erdogan. Ebru, a real estate agent, resents the Syrians for getting European Union money and tries to unseat Ismail. Huseyin, a shop owner, defends his Syrian neighbors from a violent mob. Murat, an “Islamic fundamentalist barber,” pledges his fealty to Erdogan, whom he calls “the most democratic person in the world.”

Erdogan, for his part, emerges from this account as a ruthless autocrat who rose to power through undeniable popular support. He was a poor boy turned soccer player turned mayor of Istanbul. In his first several years as Turkey’s prime minister, he improved the health care system and civil infrastructure, bringing measurable benefits to people’s lives. But then came the corruption and oppression, and the gutting of state institutions, where loyalty was now favored over expertise.

In February 2023, when massive earthquakes tore through Turkey, killing more than 50,000 people, the cost of such depredations was laid bare: “Erdogan had so centralized power around his person until he rendered Turkey a country that no longer worked.”

Still, he won the election that was held later that year, with 52 percent of the vote. Hansen sees some hope at the edges: principled people who navigate their way around obstacles, finding the seams in the armor, “whatever pathways within institutions hadn’t yet been obstructed, whatever avenues of freedom remained open to them.” But improvisation doesn’t add up to an effective opposition.

Part of Clark’s subtlety is the way in which the category of “what Suzanna refuses to know” remains undefined. Is it, as her grandmother would have it, full comprehension of her mother’s crime? Is it the realm of cold hard facts in general? Or is it nothing less than her own personhood, what with Suzanna’s self-curtailing commitment to remaining within visiting distance of the hill? Whatever the case, Suzanna’s mode of consciousness seems to grant her less quantifiable, more precious forms of knowledge. Even into her teenage years there’s a visionary quality to the way she experiences the world — as if she were a tiny, strange saint of a religion of her own devising.

All this numinousness isn’t to say that Clark can’t also be very droll. Consider, for example, the flock of captious old Commie dowagers who surround the grandmother and on whom Suzanna waits, obediently dispensing gin. These ostensible friends like to ask one another things like, “Remember, Sylvie, when you were a Nazi?”

Clark’s gifts for both the comic and the visionary reach their peak in a virtuoso, semi-hallucinatory passage toward the end of the novel. Facing death, the grandmother enlists Suzanna’s help in burning her personal effects. Even her wig is destined for the pyre — a wastebasket on the terrace. As Suzanna dutifully tosses it into the flames, an unholy vision presents itself: “The wig rose right out of the basket of its own accord, never seeming more like human hair than it did in that instant, hovering before us, burning, presenting itself, then sweeping over the railing, caught on its own fierce wind.”

Soon, with the wig transfigured into a kind of premature ghost of its owner, “my grandmother is looking at me and she is telling me everything: about her mother, her mother’s hair. …” The pages that follow, conjuring the affective lives of generations of women, are both dreamlike and the most exhilaratingly all-seeing of the book. In this sense, Suzanna is wide awake.

THE HILL | By Harriet Clark | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $27