Second meeting of the seventh edition of "The Garden" Reading Group.
"The Idiot" by Elif Batuman
Reading and commentary by Paolo Gualandi
The work:
Elif Batuman does, with a truly unique grace and humor, something extraordinary: the tale of youth. Of that time, that is, in which every experience comes to us as if for the first time, of that age of life (the only one) in which we learn everything, always, at every moment. But also of that age of which, as Proust said, we would not repeat anything, of those days that seen again today, however clouded by the filter of nostalgia, appear to us as a long and despairing sequence of mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings. Of idiocies. A time that was full of boredom and spin, but which then seemed to us full of meaning, decisive, exciting. So what is it that makes certain facts of life meaningful and others less so? Might it not be the way we tell them, Batuman says, the way we make literature out of them?
Author:
Elif Batuman was born in New York in 1977 to a family of Turkish descent. After receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Stanford, she began writing in numerous journals. A contributor to The New Yorker since 2010, she has won numerous awards. By her Einaudi has also published The Possessed: stories of great Russian novelists and their readers.
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center