Either, Or by Elif Batumen

“I understood that novels…were serious and important, and that, just as my parents' job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone's job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.”

I cannot put my finger on what makes Batuman's novels so oddly readable, but I found that following Selin along during her sophomore year at Harvard was just as intoxicating as meeting her freshman year in The Idiot.

Either/Or is, in every regard, a sequel to The Idiot and we dive right back into the inertia that is a highly intellectualized college life. But all the rites of passage are there as well -- the pressures of partying, worrying about relationships and overthinking every little thing. Either/Or is a deeper exploration of all these factors and Selin's self examination is at a much higher level than your typical college student, but I found that hanging out in her consciousness was a highly entertaining place to be.

The title is taken from Kierkegaard's book Either/Or; A Fragment of Life; "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically" and when Selin stumbles across a copy of his novel in a bookstore, she has an epiphany "My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?" As I said, highly intellectualized.

What contributes most to my enjoyment of Selin's stories are that she's so self-deprecatingly funny and she's obsessed with literature. Batuman created Selin with just the right blend of awkward and intellectual. I love coming of age stories and ultimately, that is what both these novels are. One might expect we will meet up with Selin again for junior year, but I listened to a podcast with the author and she said "no" this is the end and as I flipped the last page today, it makes perfect sense where she decided to stop. For a character driven novel with a very loose plot, it was tied up really well in the end.

This is absolutely a book that needs to find the right reader but I found the reading experience to be just that - an experience.