With a nod to Fyodor Mikhailovich

 

When you look at a relationship from the outside, it's really obvious what one person (the one who's point of view you're sharing) or the other should do. It's easy to see that the person they are obsessed with is being a bastard, leading you on, behaving unfairly.

"What an idiot!" you think. Surely, she can see...

But what is she supposed to be seeing? That he has a girlfriend? That although he writes her these long, very interesting emails, the kind of emails that make her think, ponder, fall in love with him, that he has said nothing about "their" relationship with each other, that he is content to jog along, be intriguing, ask her out, interrupt her friendship with another better looking guy whom she has been friends with since high school, even act jealous, while promising nothing? That the moment, he casually referenced his girlfriend and then bumped into her (like it was nothing at all, like every word and gesture was not a knife) she should have ended things and stuck to her guns?

What an idiot.

And yet, we've all been in those relationships where we stood outside ourselves and scolded us for being so stupid, for having no dignity, for allowing someone to string us along as they pleased, for playing a second string and not caring that we were playing a second string because just being in their presence made us so happy, made our hearts light up.

I love The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Simply love it. I love how Selin, the protagonist, who is doing an English degree at Harvard, the Harvard, wonders why professors discussing Anna Karenina cannot talk about what she really wants to know, which is why Anna killed herself -- because that is too basic to discuss. Instead, they want to know about Russian society in the 19th century as demonstrated by the novel, because apparently, that is more important. 

I like her observations (in some ways she actually seems to be on the spectrum), how she cannot tell if the guy she is in love with, Ivan, is actually good looking. All she can tell her friend, Svetlana, who asks, is that he is tall. Very tall. And more importantly, she can't tell if his girlfriend is attractive. All she can say is that she is pale.

Selin is Turkish American. She was born in America but she is bilingual and this cuts up her world in a different way. She is a different person speaking Turkish, than she is speaking English. There is a lot of theory about linguistics here and how, the language we speak shapes our world.

I love these university-type novels, I love what the people, walking along the hallowed halls of academia, think about. I love the papers they have to write, the erudite theories they have to grapple with. I feel my heart racing, just a little.

But then we go back to the love story and I feel (just a little) irritated. I feel like she should show a little spunk. When she wrote him that nasty email in the middle of the book (because of what he had written, because of how he had dismissed her), I felt like cheering. But the very next time she seems him, she is overjoyed, unable to hold on to just a little bit of that anger, forgetting that she was angry in the first place, wondering why he is ignoring her.

Yes, just a little bit autistic.

But what I've neglected to mention so far is just how funny this novel is. It breaks out here and there in impossible situations which are so true to life because of this very impossibility (life being more ridiculous than fiction) that you have to put the book down and burst into unearthly cackles.

Or at least, I do. 

I found myself thinking about a girl from school, Meredith Wittman, who had lived on the same floor as me and Hannah and Angela, though the few times I said hi to her, she murmured something without looking at me or moving her mouth. A graduate of Andover, she carried her books in a Christian Dior bag and had once written a feature for the student newspaper's weekly magazine about Boston's salsa and merengue scene. I happened to know, because I had overheard her telling her friend Bridey, that Meredith Wittman was doing a summer internship at New York magazine and for a moment now I reflected on the fact that, although Meredith Wittman and I both wanted to be writers, she was going about it by interning at a magazine, whereas I was sitting at this table in a Hungarian village trying to formulate the phrase "musically talented" in Russian, so I could say something encouraging by proxy to an off-putting child whose father had just punched him in the stomach. I couldn't help thinking that Meredith Wittman's approach seemed more direct.

Or how about this?

My mother swam for half an hour a day, holding her head very upright. Sometimes I joined her. Once when we were swimming along like that together we came upon a gigantic floating turd floating at eye level. Thinking it might be some kind of a stick or small log, I pointed it out to my mother. "It's shit," she said with a pained expression.

None of my aunts believed what we had seen. They kept trying to refute us on theoretical grounds. "Shit would have fallen apart into small pieces," Aunt Arzu said. 

"It would never float intact like that," Senay agreed. 

"Who heard of shit floating? Does shit float? I've never heard of such a thing," Seda chimed in. 

"I say this as a doctor," said my mother. "Go swim over there and you'll see shit floating."