![]() ![]() Yet these very meandering qualities prove to be the most engrossing they enable the reader to ramble through Selin’s consciousness and become privy to the inconsequential yet all-absorbing triumphs and tragedies of early adulthood. ![]() Dry-witted and meandering, both books embody the qualities Selin uses to describe Bleak House, a novel ‘as simultaneously absorbing and off-putting as someone else’s incredibly long dream’. Adrift on the Ivy League campus, Selin turns to linguistics and Russian literature as tools to navigate life, looking to literary protagonists for advice on how to approach her bewildering variety of opportunities. While the former recounts the freshman year of Selin Karadağ, a Turkish-American student at Harvard, the latter begins with Selin’s sophomore year. Her debut novel, The Idiot, and its sequel, Either/Or, are just such books. ‘Write long novels, pointless novels,’ Elif Batuman once urged. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |