![]() ![]() Obsessive fixations on Ivan, on partying, and on her roommate’s beauty fade in and out, eclectic and paradoxically insignificant. ![]() ![]() Time seems to pass without consequence inside Selin’s matter-of-fact narration. Selin and Batuman are both daughters of Turkish-Americans raised in New Jersey and attending Harvard College to pursue literature, and Ivan, Selin’s persistent object of desire, is a narrative iteration of Batuman’s own 18-year-old crush.īatuman’s “Either/Or” is a labor of love and practice in reflection, split into Fall Semester, Spring Semester, and Summer. However, overbearingly well-read and obnoxiously far from self-aware, Batuman’s protagonist is hard to love and even more difficult to trust.īoth “The Idiot'' and “Either/Or'' evoke Batuman’s own life, fictionalizing and re-casting the autobiographical. In her youth and her “overprivileged” position at Harvard as a Turkish immigrant’s daughter, this newfound obsession means a tangle of personal grief, classic literature, Freudian psychology, and the self-centered agonies of a college student. With her debut novel “The Idiot” having been crowned a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Elif Batuman set towering expectations for the sequel “Either/Or.” Beginning where the first novel left off, Harvard College sophomore Selin Karadağ realizes she has reached the age where the contemplation of love is absolutely vital. ![]()
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