The Idiot, Elif Batuman
The Idiot is the book that comes before Either/Or, which I read a few months ago and was halfway through before I discovered that I was apparently reading them out of order. The Idiot follows Selin through her first year at Harvard and the summer after, and is full of the same witty and wondering observations that I so loved in the second book; in fact, they barely seem to be different books at all, such is the continuity of Selin’s character and her constant speculations as to what life is. Batuman captures Selin’s stumbling steps as she makes a life for herself as an adult for the first time without the reader recognizing it as the same stumbling each of us went through in the beginning of our adult lives, too. One of the questions Selin asks herself, and for which there is no good answer (at least in my opinion), is “How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?” As she spends her summer in Hungary teaching English, she ponders on what makes someone Hungarian, or in her case, how much of herself is Turkish or American, but in much more eloquent words than I can manage here, something I have reflected on throughout my 12 years living in a country other than the one I was born and grew up in. Batuman’s prose and the endearing character of Selin make for an entertaining and lighthearted read that deals with some of life’s biggest questions.
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
As anyone who has read anything by Lorde well knows, her writing is always insightful and full of wisdom, as she was an extremely perceptive person who not only saw everything, but knew how to write about it as well. This small collection includes an essay she gave as a lecture in 1977 at the Modern Language Association conference, featuring one of her most famous lines – “Your silence will not protect you” – in addition to journal entries from around the time she had cancer, and then a mastectomy, and a final piece prepared especially for this collection. Much of what she reflects upon has to do with silence, rage, and the determination to keep living, as well as the love she has found in women and of herself: “I had this extra year to learn to love me in a different way” and “I felt positively possessed by a rage to live that became an absolute determination to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that living”. As always, Lorde’s writing has so much to teach us, as long as we are open to the teaching.