What Is the What writes: "Over the course of many years, Dave and I have collaborated to tell my story... I told [him] what I knew and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work of art." The book is typical of Eggers' style: blending non-fictional and fictional elements into a non-fiction novel or memoir. By classifying the book a novel, Eggers says, he freed himself to re-create conversations, streamline complex relationships, add relevant detail and manipulate time and space in helpful ways—all while maintaining the essential truthfulness of the storytelling. However, not all critics were impressed. Lee Siegel sees
The Idiot toward the central idea. Joseph Frank has called "The Idiot" "perhaps the most original of Dostoevsky's great novels, and certainly the most artistically uneven of them all," but he also wondered how it was that the novel "triumphed so effortlessly over the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure." Gary Saul Morson observes that ""The Idiot" brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway." The twentieth century Russian semiotician and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded the structural asymmetry and unpredictability