The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his... See more

Like many before them, Sylvie and Jérôme mistake their pursuit of taste for a pursuit of knowledge, and believe themselves to be acquiring a kind of legibility—to others and to themselves. Theirs is, in effect, “the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world.” By the novel’s penultimate page, the couple’s notion of happiness—a... See more