At the start of the book Selin has arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard and is worrying about how to live. How does she make friends? How does she fall in love? How does she come to understand the relationship between art and life, words and world? Taking a linguistics class, Selin is sure that she’s formed by her languages – English and Turkish. She is told by a new friend that she’s unusual in having an aesthetic view of the world rather than a moral one, and has a pronounced tendency to live her life as a narrative.
The novel takes place in the early 1990's so email is new and no one has a cell phone. When Selin is presented with a university email address she doesn’t know what to use it for. She quickly discovers that she can create an email relationship more real than those she’s experiencing in the flesh. She writes to fellow student Ivan, an older boy in her Russian language class, putting them both in the personae of inhabitants of their Russian textbook. The characters in question are engaged in a doomed love affair, rendered peculiar by the limited beginner’s Russian available to them. In taking on these roles, Selin and Ivan are able to expose themselves to each other while hiding behind the barrier of fiction. Cool way to look at coming of age through an odd lens.
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