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Absurdly wonderful, this 1990s historical exploration focuses on our protagonist’s quest to understand language, love, and their relationship with meaning, in the wildly obscure wonderland of her freshman year at Harvard University.

A heroine like no other, Selin Karadag, eighteen years old, is the tallest living member of her family.With her ” bright striking look, like a child’s “, and her deep-seated ability to take absolutely everything at face value, Selin is a Harvard freshman studying the roots of linguistics, and the Russian language.

Selin’s inner world (often, strangely, featuring the color yellow), is laid out here in a stream-of-consciousness-like narrative that outlines her straight-faced-yet-hilarious, naively-hopefully-yet-cynical, and always wildly-learned interpretation of the events, feelings, wants and dreams she does not know how to acknowledge, or process. The result (one of the best books this reader has encountered in a long while) is a laugh-out-loud, absurdist compendium of random thoughts, observations, and eccentric characters, as Selin, unrooted, wanders through her new University life, — meeting dozens of new friends and acquaintances, and conducting the strangest sort of semiotic “love” affair.

An endearing odd-ball (part brilliant academic, part insecure and hopeful child), Selin is totally unaware of her own charm – worrying instead that she doesn’t measure up, comparing herself to her friends and colleagues, and stranger yet, to the girls encountered in the lyrics of popular Beatles songs. As Selin questions the role of language, semantics, philosophy and culture in creating meaning, she desperately, intellectually, seeks some sort of structure or frame to her ever-widening, chaotically unrestrained life view.

Does language create meaning, or is meaning simply expressed in language? If the former, does richly abstract language, shared, then present the highest path to ultimate connection (and love)?

Unable to form opinions or make choices, Selin, an intellectual with a big brain but with very limited emotional exposure, is characteristicaly disconnected, beginning with her breezy Turkish mom (herself a rationality-first foreign medical graduate). Selin, ultimately, worries that virtually every institution (including her own University experience) may after all, be an abject lesson in “uselessness”.

“It came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasnt going to say them.”

A terrific read, and one that this reader inhaled across two very enjoyable reading afternoons, this book is highly recommended for readers who sometimes find themselves questioning any of life’s conventions held close. Which of us could help but relate to the inimitable Selin, who finds herself, quite literally, (and so cleverly) questioning absolutely everything she encounters?