EITHER/OR by Elif Batuman
★★★★★
Penguin Press, 2022
“I felt that this is what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.”
Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot, published in 2017, chronicles a year in the life of Harvard freshman Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants who has vague notions of becoming a writer and thinks she may achieve this goal by looking closely at the way language works. Though she is derailed from her objective, the events of Batuman’s first novel take Selin on an odyssey through the Hungarian countryside in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years as she chases the affections of an aloof older student, Ivan, who has just graduated and is about to move to California.
You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse and a piece I wrote about Søren Kierkegaard HERE.
pace, amore, libri 