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3.5 

The Idiot

By Elif Batuman
The Idiot by Elif Batuman digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction

“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ

“Masterly funny debut novel . .  . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair

A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.


The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. 
 
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.

With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.

Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed The Millions

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4815 Reviews

3.5
Thinking Face“There were so many times where the book evoked the same feeling you get when you’re stuck behind a slow walker that you can’t get around. I liked some parts of it to be sure, especially the nostalgic elements (even though I was born in the 90’s). I enjoyed the references and homage to Russian literature, but Russian literature is one of my least favorite genres for a reason. I loved trying something new and there were some funny moments but overall not my cup of tea.”
“I was recommended this novel on the basis of wanting more realistic dialogue. Does this perhaps take that to another level? Yes. Perhaps the differences in native language between characters is responsible for this though. As a student of mathematics and linguistics who has studied in Hungary, I enjoyed reading about the schoolwork and the location. It took me a bit to get into the book but I felt myself curious to know more about Ivan and Selina’s relationship as it grew. The email correspondence was unique and I enjoyed living through Selin’s freshman year. However, once she heads to Hungary for the summer, I felt the plot was too disjointed. Also it never became clear to me what the basis of their relationship was and why it was affecting her this much. Although the end was rushed, I had a giggle at the end where she decides to leave behind linguistics after an entire novel of her studying linguistics. I found myself in favor of Batuman’s quick dialogue and minor plot shifts. She was able to fit so much college experience into the first half of the book this way and I felt it relayed a lot of the whirlwind that is freshman year without being verbose. Overall the writing style stands out as does the extraordinary attention to detail that Batumam demonstrates BUT I just never felt truly hooked on the characters or their stories. Rarely do I read from a book and think “wow this is exactly how I think about this” and yet Selin was written to change this. “Lightrain was falling outside. I didn't have an umbrella. Dread gripped my stomach. I had betrayed Ivan by talking about him-by causing a stranger to call him "this computer fellow" and to compare him with the Unabomber. Thanks to me, there now existed in the world some neural representation of "this computer fellow." I had the irrational fear that Ivan would find out about it, or that he somehow already knew.””
Expressionless Face“I fear I was not the target audience for this book. I was 4 in 1995 so maybe that's why and I couldn't relate to it or I was just confused the whole time. I honestly should've DNF'd it but I wanted to try something new.”

About Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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