This and Batuman’s previous The Idiot are both fabulous campus novels which I’d recommend to any former humanities student. ( )

She's not for everyone, but she sure is for me. ( )

I think I might have loved this even more than "The Idiot". Batuman is an absolute genius and has a way with words that I've never seen before. This was everything I hoped it would be and MORE. ( )

I want to read everything by Elif Batuman. I loved inhabiting Selin's world, her worldview became mine. Much like The Idiot, Either/Or has given me a lot to think about: my bilinguality, unpopular opinions, art, literature, friendships, boys, grammar. I kept delaying finishing the novel because that's how much I wanted to keep lingering in Selin's world. ( )

Good Writing as a Bad Habit

Walter Benjamin's writings on child-play are even more impressive if we imagine he is doing a kind of Nabokovian-noticing of his own puerile experiences. More likely, he is observing the behavior of children and writing himself backward.

Batuman's commentaries on the classics are impressive in that they strike us as precisely the A-level writing of a precocious college sophomore. How is Batuman able to write at that angle subtended by deeper-than-you-thought-but-not-too-deep interpretations. Likely she is benefiting from her students in her role as an instructor on literature (and that 80% of the structuring commentary is left out of the text). We already know that bright undergraduate who instinctually understands the chauvinist interpretations of Madame Bovary and our so-called "utilitarian moralists" to be false (brilliant), subsequently progressing to the insipid equivocation of Shakespeare and Intercourse (less brilliant), and followed by a vague perplexity on the subject of "littérature féminine" in the work of Irigaray and Cixous (not brilliant).

Later on, no longer supported by the perennial refreshment of freshman (Sophomoric) interpretations, the author is writing about a trip to Turkey at an impossibly high level. A bad habit that she is always lapsing into good writing (the other being titling her books after more famous works), which we no longer find believable in context.

ASIDE:
Well-executed descriptions of intercourse and initial thoughts related to this. Per Heti, some people may be the great blow job artists of our age (but they, by virtue of the absurd, maintain this as an incognito). Few are willing to teach as Batuman does.

College freshmen should not be made to read Kierkegaard. ( )