This one gets its own post, because I can’t stop thinking about it. Slight spoilers but nothing that would ruin it — it’s more about the ride than the plot.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
First, two of my pretty well-trodden doom paths:
Taking sketches of interactions and filling in the gaps with narrative, constructing characters, motives, and meaning as it suits me
Falling in love with foreigners and dismissing red flags as cultural differences or misunderstandings
That said, if you know much about The Idiot (the read-it-in-two-sittings Batuman version, not Dostoevsky’s) and/or my life, you’ll see why it got me good. If not, here goes:
It’s the late 90s at Harvard. Our main character, Selin, does not understand email, does not know what she wants to do with her life, and does not seem particularly adept at social (much less romantic) interaction. The first part is a sort of disaffected girl-who-reads stumble through the newfound freedom of college. It’s fun. She takes linguistics, she meets a weird Hungarian in her Russian class, who has a matching boy-who-reads vibe. You expect them to immediately hit it off, but turns out he’s a weirdo — so instead, they start this philosophizing-into-the-void email exchange that you couldn’t accurately call conversation.
The exchange continues, escalates, goes off the rails. She tells him she’s falling in love with him. He says he has a girlfriend, trying to create distance when he says, “My love for you is for the person writing your letters.” At this point, I hate this guy, because I know this guy. He’s a dick. He has a girlfriend but he’s gulping up Selin’s attention, he won’t talk to her when they run into each other, his emails are completely self-centered, he’s…kind of cruel.
She goes to see a therapist.
“From what you’ve described, it sounds as if he barely exists at all… [It’s] a completely idealized relationship. […] Now, here’s something I’d like you to think about. You don’t actually know a thing about this fellow, do you? It’s possible he doesn’t even exist. […] He’s the ideal companion because you get to fill in the blanks. […] He looks like an ideal person, but the real person behind that mask could have all kinds of problems.”
She doesn’t go back for a second session.
This could have been a buck back into reality, but somehow her unwillingness to accept the (obviously sound) advice of the therapist made me take her side in a way I hadn’t before. Rejecting a completely rational explanation of what’s causing your grief is a habit that resonates. Suddenly I don’t hate this guy anymore — like Selin, I’m waiting for any sign of him, waiting to see his name show up on the page or see the sans-serif font that’s used for their emails1. By the end of the book, I kinda feel like I’m half in love with this guy too. They get in fights. They stay up all night. They swim in ponds. They go to Europe and go canoeing and huff at one another. There’s not exactly sexual tension — and there’s absolutely no indulgence of it — but this is somehow heart wrenching. It’s one of the most accurate pictures of how incredibly stupid it is to fall in love (?) with someone you only kinda know, especially when there’s a language barrier and particularly when the internet is involved.
She’s studying linguistics. Between the two of them, they speak like ten languages. There are cute misunderstandings and interlingual jokes. She gets all up in arms about a professor rejecting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language influences thought, not vice versa)2. In the end, that’s a big theme — what we lose or purposefully let go of in the space between languages and mediums.
When someone has had such a fundamentally different cultural experience from you, it’s easy to write off otherwise problematic (or even just annoying) behavior as some kind of quirk or misunderstanding — and even more so when there’s physical distance or you don’t see one another often. It’s easy to get caught up, then caught off guard when it all goes to shit.
I can see how someone would hate this book. If you didn’t grow up on the internet and you’ve never experienced the weirdness of dating across languages, it probably seems implausible. But there’s more to it than that — as Selin decides that she’s interested in pursuing writing, not linguistics, she starts to come to terms with how her desire to see the narrative sense in things has fucked with her judgment. She gets this lecture from her friend:
“For a while now I’ve been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,” Svetlana said. “And I think that’s the reason. It’s because we both make up narratives about our own lives. I think that’s why we decided not to live together next year. Although oviously it’s also why we’re so attracted to each other.”
“Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives.”
“But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an inner life, or that she doesn’t think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She’s in my story — I’m not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It’s like an unspoken contract. With you, there’s more instability and tension, because I know you’re making up a story too, and in your story I’m just a character.”
It made me think about how many of my own seemingly implausible choices have been made out of the desire to cram my experience into a narrative mold. It was disquieting and emotionally manipulative and just incredibly well done.
Amanda on ice. Watercolor.
Related: Here’s a short piece I wrote as an intro to a never-finished collection of travel essays.
This book was also a wild reminder of how getting to know someone used to play out in such maddeningly slow motion. Also, how you could just completely lose track of people.
I wrote an essay about this a long time ago. I won’t share the whole thing — coincidentally enough it’s a sunny piece about a time when I thought I’d met The Right Person and ho buddy was I wrong. It didn’t age well. Anyway, here’s the relevant part, which features advice from one of my coolest ephemeral friends, a Catalan filmmaker and journalist.
In Barcelona, I had drinks with a man who was charming and smart, spoke five languages, and insisted we speak Spanish. We hit it off immediately, bouncing around the city talking about books, about passion, about photography. He told me that the key to speaking another language well was to embrace how you could be a different person in every language you learned. A new language was a new perspective, a new personality, a new chance.
I needed all of that.
I started to embrace who I was in Spanish. I wasn’t someone with a boring desk job; I introduced myself as translator, because it was what I cared about. Instead of making people trip over my English name, I let them call me Cati and teach me how to dance.
By inhabiting Spanish I figured out who I am as a traveler: when I travel I feel unbound, I feel daring and outgoing and alert. I talk to strangers and accept help graciously. I avoid making plans in favor of chance.
The more I traveled, the more this became who I was, always. I started to need the movement, the adventure, the novelty of it.