She is told by a new friend that she’s unusual in having an aesthetic view of the world rather than a moral one, and knows too that she has a pronounced tendency to live her life as a narrative.
Selin is sure that she’s formed by her languages – English and Turkish. How does she make friends? How does she fall in love? How does she come to understand the relationship between art and life, words and world? Taking a linguistics class, she disagrees with her teacher, who believes that people think in the same way whatever language they think in. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot.Īt the start of the book, the autobiographical heroine Selin has just arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard and is worrying about how to live. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile disconnected from lived experience. D o events matter more when witnessed in real life than in books? Does language necessarily render experience second-hand? In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life.
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