Either/Or
ELIF BATUMAN
(JONATHAN CAPE, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

It is 1996. Selin Karada is 19 and returning to Harvard for her second year, determined to find out how to live. In her first year – depicted in Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (2017) – she became pre­occupied with the philosophy of language, particularly the idea that learning a language might allow you to enter the thought world of another people – or person, like the mysterious Hungarian maths student, Ivan. Now, her interest is ethics. Unlike the protagonists of much contemporary autobiographical fiction, however, she does not want to live a good life, but an interesting one: aesthetic rather than ethical, a distinction she finds in the work by Kierkegaard that gives the novel its title, which she picks up by chance in a bookshop.