The Idiot
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.9
(746)
Elif Batuman
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 FairA 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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More Details:
Author
Elif Batuman
Pages
432
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2017-03-14
ISBN
1101622512 9781101622513
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"I really love this book. It's a character-driven novel, and I have never related to a character (maybe even person?) so much before. For this, I recognize that this book feels as if it was written for me, and so I wouldn't give it a general recommendation to everyone, though I'd definitely encourage most to at least try it - I did love it after all. The writing was also exactly my cup of tea - because there was a relatable mc AND she was driving the story, it made her voice so easy to consume, and the book hard to put down, it was only natural that such a character come from a writer I love. 5/5🪨
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"This book grew on me thanks to the humor and also the unique treatment of the main character’s, Selin’s, naïveté in such a charming way. It was almost completely disarming to the reader. Whereas you might be facepalming while reading other similar characters written by other authors, I felt nothing but tenderness toward Selin. "
C
CaitVD
"CONTIANS SPOILERS
I would give this a 3.5 out of 5 if possible. I really wanted to love this book. I do enjoy the author’s writing style, especially her dry humor. But I did not understand what Selin saw in Ivan. Sometimes he was a jerk outright! The book ends so abruptly. And nothing happens with Ivan after all that? (Apparently the author’s book Either Or is a sequel I guess? But after reading this book I am not interested in the sequel) The book seemed like a series of vignettes; there wasn’t much holding the book together (besides Ivan). There were also a lot of incidental character names and it could be hard to keep characters straight. "