I review books here on
the promise that I have read them cover to cover. So there is really no trace of
the many books I have started but not finished, probably for many different
reasons. Sometimes I have forced myself to finish a book in order to review it
and for the past 150 pages I have been reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in that spirit.
It started
well enough: she is clever and funny and I bookmarked a few passages to quote.
It’s easy to imagine how she is a successful staff writer on the New Yorker – though I remember that Jessa
Crispin once called that publication “like a dentist magazine”.
The problem is the
absence of plot. One reviewer quoted on the cover of my edition calls it “an
addictive, sprawling epic”. I agree about the sprawling. The long drawn-out
non-relationship relationship between Selin and Ivan seemed to be going nowhere
except geographically at the point where I gave up on the book (page 269, shortly
after a cast of new and re-assembled characters had been perfunctorily
introduced and finally persuaded me to give up).
It may well be that Selin comes of age in the 150 pages I am not going
to read, but I am afraid that for this reader she is taking too long about it.
I suppose I should
formally record Ceci n’est pas une critique
du livre
