Selin’s closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Her address contains her last name, “Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent.” When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman’s ( The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author’s thematic concerns and style. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. It’s fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |