![]() Selin is frustrated by professors who dodge what she considers the important questions. ![]() One example: a philosophy of language seminar on formulating a theory that would allow a Martian to understand what it is to know a language. ![]() Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.Įccentric faculty members and their bizarre intellectual exercises provide plenty of comedic fodder. ![]() Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Like her essays, Batuman’s bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. This is a girl who is so determined to “be unconventional and say meaningful things” that she takes even throwaway questions like “How’s it going” so seriously she’d rather not respond at all when she can’t think of a good answer. She’s a smart, well-read, often laughably earnest overthinker who loses sleep fretting about Noam Chomsky. Like Batuman, her narrator, Selin Karadag (the g is silent, she tells everyone, to their amusement), was born in June 1977, the daughter of Turkish Americans, and raised in New Jersey. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |