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Summary
Summary
An instant New York Times bestseller!
A New York Times Notable Book of 2022
"Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were . . .This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations." -- The New York Times
"Batuman is a genius, rendering human folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal." -- Vogue
From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot , the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood
Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?
Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.
Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.
Author Notes
Elif Batuman's first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this effervescent sequel to The Idiot, Batuman continues charting the sentimental education of Selin, a student of Russian literature at Harvard. As Selin begins her sophomore year in 1996, she's still nursing an unrequited crush on Ivan, a Hungarian graduate student. Meanwhile, her friends Svetlana and Riley begin dating boys on campus, causing Selin to lament their perceived loss of independence (after Svetlana hooks up with the guy she'll end up with, Selin predicts, "She would never again be what she had been, not in my life, and not in her own"). Observant, defiant, and newly on antidepressants, Selin approaches the mystery of human relations with a beginner's naivete and sharp intelligence. At parties, in dorm rooms, and through reading French, Russian, and German literature and philosophy, she reflects on the tragic asymmetry of connections between men and women, and wonders how, exactly, "a person could live an aesthetic life." Meanwhile, she recounts her frustrations with Proust and reverence for Fiona Apple and Lauryn Hill, and embarks on a messy series of email threads with Ivan and his ex-girlfriend. Batuman's light touch and humor are brought to bear on serious questions, enabling the novel to move quickly between set pieces like an S&M-themed student party, poignant recollections of Selin's parents' divorce, and a harrowing travelogue as Selin begins a summer job in Turkey. As accomplished as The Idiot was, this improves upon it, and Batuman's already sharp chops as a novelist come across as even more refined in these pages. Readers will be enraptured. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)
Booklist Review
Selin, the magnetic protagonist in Batuman's brilliant and comedic first novel, The Idiot (2017), returns to Harvard for her sophomore year in 1996, still bewildered by her elusive crush, Ivan. The American-born daughter of two now-divorced Turkish doctors, Selin is enthralled by Russian literature, studying Russian, and intent on becoming a writer. She picks up Kierkegaard's Either/Or as part of her quest to comprehend the differences between the ethical and the aesthetic life, debating the fine points with her confident friend Svetlana. Stymied by her relentless moral inquisitiveness--Why should one have children? Is it reprehensible for writers to turn real people into fictional characters?--Selin follows her cancer-survivor mother's advice and starts taking antidepressants, which make her feel less daunted, precipitating alarming and funny new quandaries that, in hall-of-mirrors fashion, reveal evermore conundrums. Month by month, Batuman's brainy, attentive, outspoken narrator grapples with the absurd (literary pretension, academics, sex) and the sublime (literature, music, sex). As summer looms, Selin secures a gig writing about Turkey for the Let's Go travel series, which, thanks to her aunt, catalyzes protective interference by Turkish intelligence agents which does not prevent disconcerting, frightening, sexy, and hilarious encounters with men on the make. Through it all, valiant Selin reads and ponders the human condition, culminating in a breath-catching ending that will leave spellbound readers hoping for more from Batuman's bright and witty adventurer of conscience.
Guardian Review
Should one spend one's brief time on Earth guided by hedonism and pleasure, or by morality and responsibility? The second instalment of Elif Batuman's chronicle of Selin, a student of Russian literature at Harvard in the 1990s whose biography corresponds fairly closely to the writer's own, takes as its title Søren Kierkegaard's first book, which suggests that one must choose whether to live according to ethical or aesthetic principles. For Selin, now in her sophomore year and with an unsatisfactory, perplexing quasi-relationship with mathematics student Ivan apparently behind her, the real issue seems not so much how to make a choice between two starkly opposed systems, but how to start living at all. Kierkegaard is not Selin's only template: as in Batuman's preceding novel, The Idiot, and her nonfiction book, The Possessed, works of literature exist, variously, as vast mansions in which to wander, marvelling at the ingenuity and beauty of the fixtures and fittings; unexpectedly capricious haunted houses, in which mirrored doors open on to dead-end corridors and distorted reflections; and, occasionally and disappointingly, arid thought experiments, destined to trap the reader in repetitive and unyielding arguments. In the course of Either/Or, Selin finds herself in agitated dialogue with André Breton's Nadja. "I started keeping a running record in my notebook of everything in Nadja that seemed related to any of my problems," Selin explains, before pondering the possibility of writing a concordance to the novel in the manner of Nabokov's Pale Fire. "I knew that nobody would want to read such a book; people would die of boredom." Later, she takes herself off to her student bunk to read Proust, and weeps at the thought that, like him, she will spend much of her life repairing to bed early and minutely dissecting his memories. Why, she wonders, does Proust have to keep thinking about this stuff? "Why couldn't he write a book about something else?" Selin's creative dilemma - that she wants not only to read but to write novels - is accompanied by other "real-life" complications. One is how to reconcile the Turkish and American parts of her heritage and upbringing, as the daughter of divorced parents who has grown up in New Jersey, but travelled each summer to see her family in Ankara; she often bristles at how cultures and places outside the US are subjected to its lens, and at how ignorant Americans appear to be of their own blinkers. She must also navigate the profound weirdnesses of her fellow students and, perhaps most pressingly, experience her first kiss. In terms of writing, she suspects that there's something more to creating fiction than simply titivating one's own observations and daily life, that some form of literary alchemy must take place (though she's not always convinced that the supposedly great writers have achieved it). As Leonard, her creative writing tutor, points out to a classmate whose short story sounds depressingly pedestrian and strikingly similar to his own life, it's fine if you want to write about not being able to get laid, but you have to take the reader with you. Batuman's success in Either/Or is how thoroughly she exploits the gap between Selin's scepticism about the creation and the consequences of literature and her narrator's wonderfully idiosyncratic comic voice. While Selin is worrying over how to marshal the fragments of existence into writing, she is tossing off one-liner after one-liner, her tone ranging from the lugubrious to the withering. When her friend Svetlana encourages her to see a therapist to process her confusion and grief about Ivan, she reflects that Svetlana's own counsellor "was just the kind of jocular Socratic advice-implier I didn't want to hear from". Of another friend, Jeremy, who is in love with two girls named Diane, she notes that "even though he talked about the Dianes constantly, he didn't seem incapacitated; he always had the strength to pivot to his other favourite topic, which was the works of Thomas Pynchon". Perhaps I'm projecting, but I felt that an entire lifetime of talking to men about books was encapsulated there. Selin's tendency to bounce between such shrewd character assessments and complete naivety is also charming, even when it borders on the far-fetched. Her disbelief at the sheer oddness and pointlessness of the mechanics of sex, which she apprehends as a rite of passage she must endure rather than enjoy, is so wholeheartedly deployed that one feels all the reading of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther will not make a dent; similarly, her Ivan-shaped heartbreak is likely to remain resistant to even the most detailed scrutiny of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Although it's a form of literature that Selin doesn't mention, her story has much in common with the picaresque; episodic in structure, filled with acquaintances, misadventures and strangers whose motives are questionable, it is meandering rather than propulsive. Batuman thinks nothing, for example, of taking three pages to describe Selin's reaction to listening to the Fugees, or to reading Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers, which, fairly predictably, a male friend has suggested to her - she comes to the astute and pithy conclusion that it is better to be the writer than the written about. Either/Or does not exactly conclude; rather, a third volume seems almost inevitable, given that Selin appears to be leaving Kierkegaard and Breton to one side as she embarks on a reading of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. Sex has also entered the frame. Spending her summer updating student guidebooks, Selin seems suddenly struck by the idea that conveying information plainly - "Hearty sandwiches. Hot dishes" - might be just as useful, and indeed truthful, as the greatest literature. From the vantage point of greater age, one might point out that it is not an either/or situation, and perhaps Selin's further adventures will help her appreciate that.
Kirkus Review
The heroine of The Idiot (2017), Batuman's Pulitzer Prize finalist, continues to interrogate the intersection of art and identity during her sophomore year at Harvard. It's 1996, and Selin is embarking on her fall semester with a broken heart and a lingering obsession with Ivan, the mathematician she'd fallen in love with as a first-year student. When she's not checking her email, hoping for a message from him, she's reading Kierkegaard and André Breton, looking for clues about the kind of person she wants to be. Walking to the library on a Saturday night, she encounters small groups of students, "the girls laughing hysterically and collapsing against the guys' chests. I knew that was what a person was supposed to be doing, but I didn't know why, or how." All Selin knows for sure is that she will be a novelist, but she's still trying to figure out how to do that, too, and she sees the problem of how to live and the question of how to write as two sides of the same dilemma. She spends a lot of time thinking about sex--something she wants to have done but doesn't actually want to do--and it says a lot about her that she regards her fear of sex as "immature and anti-novelistic." But making the deliberate choice to shed her virginity isn't quite the turning point she imagined. It's when she travels to Russia for an internship that she feels a new sense of self-possession and possibility. This is not a plot-driven novel, so readers who like a lot of action may not enjoy Selin's philosophizing or penchant for deep analysis. But Selin is a disarming narrator, tossing off insights that are revelatory, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny--sometimes all at once--and it's exciting to watch her become the author of her own story. Another delightfully cerebral and bighearted novel from a distinctive voice in contemporary fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this sequel to Batuman's Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot, Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is now a Harvard sophomore trying to sort out her loop-de-loop summer in Hungary and her feelings for the slippery Hungarian mathematics student Ivan even as Ivan's former girlfriend wants to chat. It's as if Selin were in the midst of a thrilling novel but one unfortunately starring an off-kilter woman who's been dumped. Can she fix that with the help of her literary syllabus and her friends?