Since childhood, Elif Batuman has been on a quest to find in literature “direct relevance to lived experience, especially to love.” Following her doctoral dissertation at Stanford, which explored how Russian writers transform experience into art, her first book was “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” a quirky, laugh-out-loud collection of essays that combined memoir, travelogue and literary criticism. The two quasi-autobiographical novels that have followed—“The Idiot” and now “Either/Or”—further underscore her conviction that literature is the best place to search for answers to life’s big questions.
Ms. Batuman wrote the first draft of her Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut novel, “The Idiot,” during a break from graduate school, in 2000-2001. It is a droll bildungsroman about a very tall, brainy first-generation Turkish-American woman’s freshman year at Harvard in the mid-1990s. Selin Karadağ—the author’s literary alter-ego—strives to make sense of courses, cultures and a baffling relationship with a very tall, strange Hungarian math major.
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