A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • Longlisted 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 … 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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Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is a highly entertaining first novel about a college student in 1995 as she navigates the confusions of relationships and language. While it somewhat lacks a conventional plot, The Idiot more than makes up for that with its narrator’s smart, deadpan, and exceptionally odd observations. It’s the funniest book I’ve read in a long time.
I was SO excited about this one, and I really tried to get into it, but just could not. I quite liked the author’s writing style, and the topic (a college freshman in 1995) was near and dear to my heart (although admittedly, I graduated in 1995 – but still, I was close enough to relate) – but the book just felt like a random assemblage of anecdotes and I couldn’t seem to find the thread that made it all cohere into something… I’m no fan of short stories, as those of you who read my reviews well know, and this felt more like a series of shorts collected around the theme of Selin’s life. She is a strange character; compelling in many ways, off-putting in others. In other words, very human and very girl-on-the-cusp-of-becoming-her-adult-self – and that should have made her very relatable, but I found myself vacillating between relating and empathizing and rolling my eyes and sighing and turning the page… This may be a wrong-book-at-wrong-time situation; I really did like the writing style, and would definitely give this one another try. Just not now. It was a 14-day library loan, and there’s not much chance I’ll come back to it yet again in that timeframe, so I’m going to have to shelve it for now…
A trip back in time to college. In this case Harvard 1996 when email was new. I enjoyed the author’s humorous storytelling, a sort of diary. Her telling of falling in love for the first time and the inability to identify and express feelings was palpable. I can remember back then what is was like negotiating boys and roommates, feeling music in my body. Taking classes that were beyond my comprehension. For me it was a course in Milton in which I literally felt I was drowning. This book has tons of allusions to marvelous literature — so many that I have read and appreciated. I laughed my way through this book that had me nostalgic for my days at university. The pacing was fast and the ending perfect.
Just a few of the books she mentioned:
Mill on the Floss
Dracula
The Magic Mountain
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The soundtrack to Legends of the fall which is one of my favorite stories had me playing it on YouTube immediately.
The dozens of cultural references and ironic humor reminded me of a gentler Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski though I know that’s a stretch!
Batuman is one of my favorite journalists. Her features in the New Yorker are some of the best the magazine has ever published. My expectations for The Idiot were very high, and I can’t help but feel let down. This is not an ambitious book. It’s pretentious autobiography thinly veiled as fiction. I was really hoping that Batuman would write something creative and challenging. Instead, she gave us a very safe book perfect for book club fodder.
I was so into this in the beginning, but the style got exhausting, nothing really happened, and I gave up over half-way through.
Self-absorbed recounting of a young person’s journey to adulthood.
I found this quiet, introspective book oddly compelling. I’d just sampled a fast-paced, supposed-to-be-exciting book that left me cold, and this book was like a literary palate cleanse! If you like books that have you highlighting meaningful thoughts and passages, give this one a try.
Not a book for everyone, but I inhaled every word.
Extremely dull and pointless. There is no plot and the characters seem empty. What a waste of time.
One of a few books that I just could not finish.
A well-written account of being young and traveling abroad.
Dismal
VERY reminiscent of Dostovsky’s work of the same name, intentional I imagine. I’m not sure it needed to be redone or brought up to date? Stream of conscious and, if you are older, a little irritating, but I imagine it would ring very true for most people of college age. I enjoyed her Turkish perspective and visiting Hungary with her. 🙂
I am not sure what it was all about! I laughed out loud once, but then back to an oddly put together sequence of events.
Momentum of the story bogged down with over-detailed seemingly meaningless bits at the end.
Slow and boring. Flat characters. Didnt bother to finish.
I only read about a third of the book, and was bored with the characters and the story, or lack there of.
I loved this romantic point of view of a first year college student.
Everything about this young woman seems awkward and clueless and yet she survives a first love experience.
I so wanted to love this book because it was well written, but I found myself utterly frustrated. It was too disjointed for me to enjoy.
I only read a third of it, as I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the characters. Part of this may be Covid-lockdown ennui, but I gave up on this book, which is very unusual for me.