I was really looking forward to reading Batuman’s The Idiot because I had heard such good things, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It somehow had an emotional pull on me before I even realized I was invested, but I’m still not sure I can call it a “good” book.
There is no real plot for the first half. It just follows Selin’s life while she is at university, discussing her various classes and the people she meets. The thoughts and tidbits feel largely unrelated to each other, and I couldn’t find a lot to care about though there were some points of relatability, like questioning how other people formulated so many opinions and so quickly. There’s a little bit more plot after Selin goes to Hungary for the summer, but it follows the same style. A lot of parts could have been removed because I had absolutely no interest in what was happening. There were moments that felt too disconnected, random, and a tad uninteresting. Why introduce characters that have nothing to do with the story… two people in a closed Baskin Robbins and one looked fat…okay, that wasn’t interesting. Moments like that just had me wondering what exactly I was reading. And there are a lot of fun facts that Selin muses on, hardly any of which I was interested in. I did like the parts that discussed the Turkish suffix -mis, though.
Part of the disconnect was intentional on the author’s part. The point was avoiding clarity, because Selin is disassociating emotionally and doesn’t fully understand anything that goes on around her. And the emails between Ivan and Selin were supposed to not make any sense. But I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to understand them until it was confirmed by Selin that she couldn’t make sense of Ivan’s emails, and near the end of the novel, Ivan and Selin confirmed that it wasn’t truly ever a real conversation, but that they each contributed totally random thoughts that didn’t have anything to do with what the other had just sent. It was an attempt to have an original interaction, but it ended up just confusing everybody.
But once the book picked up, it was occasionally amusing, particularly in the middle of the second half. I often found myself laughing out loud.
The first half was not for me for the reasons mentioned above, and it took me so long to get through the first half because I wasn’t interested in picking the book up. But once Ivan and Selin met in person and the book focused more on their relationship, I downed the book, which I noted with interest because I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it as a whole. I didn’t care about anything other than Ivan and Selin’s dynamic. I remember reading about a kid in a golf cart, and I was like yeah yeah, let’s skim because I don’t care about him (and I haven’t been a skimmer since I was in elementary school) and then I turned the page and that was the end of the book. So I literally finished the book with my mouth open in shock. I couldn’t believe that was how it ended.
And then I can’t deny it left me with an inexplicable feeling of grief and longing. Longing for her to get Ivan? For my own Ivan? I have no idea. Don’t ask me why I would even consider wanting an unavailable man. But I can’t explain the emotional dearth I felt upon finishing the book. Was there something in Selin I related to and I was connecting to more than I realized?
I went to bed feeling down, and then after midnight I remembered that there was a sequel. After a bit of research, I learned that there was no resolution to Ivan and Selin, so I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to pick it up. But going out and buying Either/Or was the first thing I did when I got off work the next day.
I truly don’t understand how I feel about the book. It somehow grabbed me without me even being aware of it, and now I have to continue reading Selin’s story, as if I’m under her spell as she was under Ivan’s.
