He’s charmed by the utter absence of trivial small talk. She spends countless hours parsing Ivan’s responses with the same rigor she brings to academic exegesis. In person, she’s awkward and tongue-tied. Online, they exchange weighty, convoluted emails about fate, free will and national identity. She initiates a correspondence through email, a thrilling new form of communication, though she quickly discovers its potential for frustrating opacity as well as enticing intimacy. But the thought that she might be boring or unexceptional upsets her even more.Ĭentral to Selin’s gradual awakening is her crush on a very tall Hungarian math major she meets in Russian class, a senior named Ivan Varga. Selin’s self-esteem is undercut by an overactive shame gland and discomfort with her 6-foot height, size 12 feet and big hands. Selin arrives at college believing that she is a writer, though she acknowledges that “this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.”īatuman captures the way college freshmen lurch between arrogance and insecurity, shortchange themselves on sleep, and obsess over relationships, budding or otherwise. I wanted to know what books really meant.”ĭeprecation is the order of the day here.

“You wanted to know why Anna had to die,” she writes, referring to Tolstoy’s Karenina, “and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. Selin is frustrated by professors who dodge what she considers the important questions. One example: a philosophy of language seminar on formulating a theory that would allow a Martian to understand what it is to know a language. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.Įccentric faculty members and their bizarre intellectual exercises provide plenty of comedic fodder. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land.

Like her essays, Batuman’s bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations.

This is a girl who is so determined to “be unconventional and say meaningful things” that she takes even throwaway questions like “How’s it going” so seriously she’d rather not respond at all when she can’t think of a good answer. She’s a smart, well-read, often laughably earnest overthinker who loses sleep fretting about Noam Chomsky. Like Batuman, her narrator, Selin Karadag (the g is silent, she tells everyone, to their amusement), was born in June 1977, the daughter of Turkish Americans, and raised in New Jersey.

The idiot elif batuman sparknotes