The Idiot (No, not that one)
Book Choice for June 2019, by Elif Batuman
Look at me, wheeeee, third post in a month, I’m really going for it! That said, I do have a lot to catch up on. Finally bringing Night and Day to an end meant that I could return to a book that I left off at the halfway point, in the end of September. See, I’m reading all the time. Just never consistently, and often several things at one time. Well, without this 12 Books a Year thing, I’m not sure I would be reading at all. It’s good to push yourself.
So no, this isn’t the Dostoyevsky book. Just imagine my boyfriend’s delighted face when he thought that it was! But it wasn’t. Still, it was very close (I believe) to having won the Pulitzer prize, which I am dimly aware of as being “very important,”and I heard about it from Booktube. I’m really glad, in general, about this choice. It is a book about language. It’s kind of about love, obsessions, those intense relationships that go nowhere, but it’s really about words and their meanings. There are about 5,000 anecdotes regarding misconceptions over what words mean crammed into this book, and some are laugh-out-loud funny, but I realized near the end, that in the second section, set in Hungary, new characters were barely described at all; we learn everything about them through their oddly pointed (to our ears) usages of English.
That’s neither good nor bad, and it is very much how the first-person narrator looks at the world. She just kind of rubs along, being alive, listening to what people say. In this way, I felt we were different, I used to care a LOT about what people said, and I believed that I could quote people exactly, especially when their words hit the ear in an unusual way, but I am not so much like that now. Either I have heard all the possible sentences which have ever been created (at the ripe age of 34) or I became myself more productive than receptive. I think about my own thoughts more now. I understand (shades of Night and Day!) how so many of our utterances are just—not worth remembering. The person who said a thing, probably actually didn’t mean it that way (as our mothers tell us when we are four). But seriously, how often do you iron out your word order and consciously pick your tone before you speak in your first language? The main character is always looking for how people betray their inner truths with their verbal emissions—and I don’t believe in that anymore, anymore than I would look to a drunk person for truth. But maybe this novel is intensely good in this way: it portrays how youth thinks.
Hmm. When I sat down to write up my thoughts on this book, finished last night, I thought I would have little to say, even though I liked it, even though I might buy a paper copy (I kindle-apped this one too) and read it again, and keep it—being a big believer in the fact that you don’t know a book until you read it twice, and a bigger believer in only keeping the BEST books— but I am not quite sure. Yes, this book is a book very much about language, and could be kept in my little collection of linguistic and philological oddities (I’m getting closer and closer to my true niche of weirdness!) but I’m not sure if the love story is worth going through again.
I mean, it’s very TRUE, despite dating to that 2 year time span in like 1998 when it was exciting to receive emails, although it’s difficult to believe that ever happened (I remember that time! Sigh.) The Idiot is about hanging out and wasting time with someone you think is way above you (the type whose aloofness is the only thing that makes them interesting) and never bringing it into the physical, despite all their chatting about literature.
Everyone has a first love story in them, so passionate and desperate, that would not, being recorded on paper, actually be able to move other people. You have to experience these things yourself, by yourself. You will read this book, enjoying all the cleverness (Harvard! multi-lingualism!) hugely, and then you will remember that there was also a “love story” in there too, and go “Aww, she was so young.” * It makes sense that she acted The Idiot.
Hopefully something like this can’t happen to you twice, although I do know that it can. And your heart can break in all sorts of ways–it doesn’t need to be over a person. It can be over your unwillingness to move beyond your fears. It can break from socio-economic inequality or the shocking tragedies that happen in life. Love isn’t all there is to write about, but this is an incredibly well-told story of First Love in the late nineties.
After I finished this book, I just kept reading on my kindle app, something that I had bought before, by chance another new book also set in the late nineties, which appropriately provided me with a quotation that almost literally stabbed my heart—(it’s true! It’s true! As the blade flashed!)
“Education is directly proportional to anxiety”
This is from “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” probably not a book I will review on here, if I ever were to finish it. This quote however, pretty much sums up my existence, and could have been cut from “The Idiot”–although The Idiot’s narrator is very self-contained and calm, with a superhuman ability to not need to discuss her love uncertainties with her friends (because this is fiction). But Education is Directly Proportional to Anxiety should have been used to caption an image, or as the watermark of the paper. It’s a hard-hitting sentence, for sure.
*Am I the only one feeling forty million years old right now? This feeling has been growing on me for the past three weeks or so.