Her philosophy of language class is all tangled up in trying to explain English sentences to Martians with elaborate use of logical notations.Īnd in her linguistics class, Selin learns about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language you speak influences how you process reality. Her English classes keep forcing her to talk about a book’s historical context instead of focusing on the words and the characters’ motivations as she would like to. “They don’t bore me at all.” The professor won’t let her into the class.Įvery time Selin turns to the academy to help her understand language, she finds herself trapped, undermined, rejected. “I like words,” she tells a professor during a screening interview for a seminar on academic writing. Selin is an 18-year-old Harvard freshman in 1996, and she keeps signing up for classes that will help her think about words. But the love affair that the book is most deeply concerned with isn’t our protagonist Selin’s flirtation with Ivan, a withholding fellow college student who already has a girlfriend. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.Įlif Batuman’s The Idiot, the Vox Book Club’s September pick, is a story about first love and first disillusionment with love.
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