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
more
An excellent rendering of the fog of the first year of college. Plus some hilarious moments involving Eastern Europe.
Not much actually happens
The book has no point. The language in the book and the writing was good I keep reading it thinking maybe she would tie it all together at the end. Sadly, no.
While the plot of this book was a bit confusing for me, in the sense that I did not know where it was going or what the point of it was, I still enjoyed some of the characters in it. It portrays a dry-humor that had me laughing out loud at times, which is the reason behind the three stars I’m giving this story. Not the best book I’ve written, but I am still glad I took the time to read it.
Lots of very positive reviews, but this story and its characters left me cold.
This was a very strange book. It was somewhat intriguing but not one I would recommend.
The ending left me hanging and unsatisfied.
This book was a total surprise. Deadpan, brilliant, relatable take in the alienation of freshman year in college, and the feeling that every interaction has heft and deeper meaning. I laughed out loud so many times and each time was unexpected. This one I will not forget
I just couldn’t get into it.
Beautiful writing. I just wasn’t very interested in the characters.
First 200 pages are brilliant and original, funny, interesting, engaging. The next 150 or so… well let’s just say it goes on for too long.
I loved this book. It made me feel like I was back in college, thinking all those “deep thoughts” and having all those pretentious conversations. The author manages to give us a sincere heroine narrator while simultaneously making arch observations. It’s a novel of ideas (on language and communication) and a novel of irrational first love; an original voice and a highly entertaining book.
The world built was great. But what was the point?
I just couldn’t get in to it, but I did try.
Unusual narrative of the thoughts of a young women’s search for self. Well written, but disjointed as were the character’s thoughts. Thought provoking.
This novel has made me grateful that I’ve never had to hang out with these pretentious, boring, elitist twits. Ivan, Serin, Shetland, et al, just go away! Of course, I attended a couple of those mid-level state universities, so how would I be able to comprehend their brilliance? I’m absolutely astounded at the glowing critical reviews it’s received.
This book details a young girl’s first year in college. I went to a junior college in the rural south 20 years before her freshman year. But she conveys the confusion and the complications of learning to navigate in a new world of almost adulthood that was very familiar to me. Some of the characters’ behavior doesn’t make sense but, heh, that was freshman year. To the author: Thank You.
Ugh. Sorry but I did not connect to this book on any level. I felt like The Idiot for the time spent reading this.
This book will blow your mind in the best ways. A great coming-of-age story about a brilliant college student literally coming to terms with the meaning of life, the meaning of words. And funny.
Call it what you may—coming of age, picaresque, bildungsroman, boring memoir—this novel soars to new promontories of wisdom and wit. Selin, the protagonist narrator and American born daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a Harvard freshman majoring in some side road of linguistics. She wants to become a writer. Many of her friends at college, most of them also of foreign backgrounds, are bright, eccentric, and distracting. One in particular, Ivan, a senior math major, Hungarian, and woefully self-centered, puts the plot on the ragged edge of a romance that Selin cannot complete. It is largely no fault of either, and somewhat of a byproduct of what was in 1995 a new invention: email. The Idiot is high-end satire concluding on a note of sheer understated brilliance. What seems like commonplace and boring narrative in places is actually clever strokes of insight leading into a final revelation that is irony well above and beyond any hotshot Ivy League scale.