Fiction, 2022
A while back, I remember talking to this guy who seemed so annoyed that I understood–and processed–life like a narrative. I couldn't understand why he was so against it, plus I liked him, so I didn’t push back. But at that moment, I thought of Joan Didion’s “we tell ourselves stories in order to live, we look for the sermon in suicide”, but I suspected he found what I did (and said, and thought) pretentious, so I kept quiet. Selin, the novel's protagonist, is silently struggling with the same dilemma. What can be put into words and arranged into a story? If thoughts and actions can, what can’t? And why is it a frustrating and futile activity, for yourself and others?
Reading Either/Or was the weirdest experience. I love literature because it helps me understand myself, but this reached an uncanny and unsettling degree. I would listen to a song, and it would appear in the novel. I would express a sentiment to my friend, and a chapter later, Selin would say the same thing. It was an exercise in feeling fully central and then realising that everything I think–that feels so specific to me–is reflected in everyone. The minute my roommate woke up, I would read out passages to her. And then I would take pictures of the same sentences to relay to my friends over coffee. I was insufferable, but she and I are, after all, the sequel to The Idiot, so what else can you expect?
Either/Or feels different from its predecessor in many ways. It’s darker, grittier, and violent in places where The Idiot would end a sentence. If The Idiot was the cold light of day, Either/Or is grimy midnight. It’s such a pleasure to read until you remember that very soon, it will end.
Song - Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying - Belle and Sebastian
Film - Before Sunrise (If you accept my theory that one of the characters, you pick who, is a figment of the other’s imagination. The conversations that take place are then, fully internal.)
Definitely checking this out! It will be my introduction to Batuman's fiction - looking forward to it!
I miss Selin and her stream of consciousness