Elif Batuman might just be the funniest overthinker of her generation. An obvious comparison would be Woody Allen, only recast as a non-problematic 6ft-tall female Turkish-American woman who is perplexed by parties and has a low tolerance for alcohol.
“If my mother told me not to do something, I didn’t do it. Everyone’s mother told them not to do things, but I was the only one who listened,” her novelistic alter ego Selin tells us in her Women’s Prize-nominated campus novel, The Idiot (2017).
Whether Batuman is writing as herself in The Possessed (2010), her memoir about her academic career studying Russian literature, or as her narrator Selin, a comically naive virgin, she is a delicious combination of cerebral, soulful and silly. Indeed, she is
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