Mountain Devil

Recommend: Yes.

I really, really, really liked The Idiot. Elif Batuman tackles every difficult-to-master trope of Sad Girl literature:

• The academically gifted but highly pretentious love interest
• The rich but self-aware girl protagonist
• The independent and brutally honest best friend
• A European jaunt
• Email correspondence that covers multiple chapters
• A play within a play
• The writer writing a writer.

And goddamn she does a good job.

Even though The Idiot stretches for more than 400 pages, it didn’t feel repetitive or boring. Reading it was a joyful experience.

The writing was clear – scenes were drawn so vividly I felt like I was watching an episode of Girls. The characters were engaging. There were so many funny character-driven set ups that nearly always came to a satisfying (sometimes even laugh out loud) end. Probably most impressive was that I ended up emotionally invested in the central romance that loosely keeps the plot moving forward.

We were walking on some sort of highway, alongside multiple lanes of whooshing cars and trucks. We came upon a grassy island in the road. There were some chairs on the grass, and a rusty shovel, like props in some depressing play.

“Maybe this is where we should sit,” Ivan said.

We sat on the chairs and opened the box of strawberries. I took a strawberry. I saw that it was covered with dirt. We didn’t have any water, so I brushed it off as best I could with my hand and ate it. It was crunchy with dirt. I took another. It looked just as dirty as the first. I held it for a long time.

Ivan and I both stared at the strawberry I was holding.

“I can’t,” I said.

He nodded. “We’ll have to bury it.” He stood, picked up the rusty shovel, and stepped on the blade to penetrate the hard earth. He dug a small hole and we put in the strawberry.

We buried all the strawberries and resumed our walk.

Possibly the biggest compliment I can give a book is that I enjoyed reading it on a plane. Base case for airflight for me is sensory deprivation. I am stuck in a cloud bound metal death wish. Why choose consciousness? For a book to draw me out of this catatonic state is a great and admirable achievement.

Just don’t read the blurb – it pretty much gave the entire plot of the book away. The fact that the whole novel could be placed so easily within a summary paragraph did make me reconsider if I liked it.

I did.