Genre Fiction
![Elif Batuman - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_elif_batuman.jpg)
The Idiot: A Novel
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 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
"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
Editorial Reviews
Fall
I didn't know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would "have" it. "You'll be so fancy," said my mother's sister, who had married a computer scientist, "sending your e . . . mails." She emphasized the "e" and paused before "mail."
That summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. "Things are changing so fast," my father said. "Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir." Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been "in" Ankara that day, so I didn't really pay attention.
On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The "address" had my last name in it-Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. "The g is silent," I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn't understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.
"You plug it into the wall," said the girl behind the table.
Insofar as I'd had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn't know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with "Dear" and "Sincerely"; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you-all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, registe...
I didn't know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would "have" it. "You'll be so fancy," said my mother's sister, who had married a computer scientist, "sending your e . . . mails." She emphasized the "e" and paused before "mail."
That summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. "Things are changing so fast," my father said. "Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir." Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been "in" Ankara that day, so I didn't really pay attention.
On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The "address" had my last name in it-Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. "The g is silent," I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn't understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.
"You plug it into the wall," said the girl behind the table.
Insofar as I'd had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn't know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with "Dear" and "Sincerely"; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you-all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, registe...
Readers Top Reviews
Euphemia Black
I was interested at first but then found the writing to be tedious and repetitive. The teaching at Harvard seems to be a little haphazard, in that Selin could dip in and out of classes at will. Her musings were random and she seemed to drift along not achieving very much.
GinaMax M.Euphemi
I wanted to like this book. There were flashes of descriptive writing that came alive for me and really evoked the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. Most of the time Selin and I were mildly bewildered. Selin's experiences are occasionally mildly amusing but mostly tedious. By the end I had the feeling that nothing had actually happened.
Prerna MishraLola
The Idiot - Elif Batuman Selin is a freshman student of languages at Harvard. She aspires to be a writer and for her “language itself is a self sufficient system.” At Harvard, she befriends Svetlana, who is an extremely smart and opinionated girl and becomes Selin’s confidante over the first year of her college life. Selin takes up a Russian language class and ends up meeting Ivan there. She develops a crush on him, which she thinks is serious love. They begin an innocent email correspondance, talking about nothing in particular. She follows him to Hungary over summers, where she teaches English to children in a village. Selin and Ivan are the quintessential “will they, won’t they” couple and their relationship, or rather the lack of it; forms the central arc of the story. I liked Selin’s character. She is an extremely intelligent girl with a very “no non-sense” attitude. Her infatuation with Ivan is also understandable, because it is very usual for an eighteen year old to have such feelings. And equally impressive is Svetlana, who is her own twisted way is often the voice of reason for Selin. I understand that this book was supposed be kind of a “coming of age story”. The first half was dedicated to describing Selin’s first year at Harvard, which personally for me triggered a lot of nostalgia about Boston and Cambridge. However, I felt the story sort of fell off rails in the second half which was dedicated to describing Selin’s summer in Hungary, interspersed with her meetings with Ivan. It stretched so long that by the end I had lost interest in knowing if they would be together or not. I guess this is one of those books which would generate a very polarised opinions, readers would absolutely love it or not like it at all. I feel this is one one the weaker books in the short list of women’s prize.
ggonzalezPrerna M
The book itself arrived in great condition. However, I purchased this book because it gained a lot of popularity and I wanted to see what the hype was about. If you’re looking for a page turner, this isn’t it. The writing is pretty and let’s you into the main character’s head. But this coming of age novel moved a little slow for my taste and left me wanting more in the end.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Fall
I didn't know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would "have" it. "You'll be so fancy," said my mother's sister, who had married a computer scientist, "sending your e . . . mails." She emphasized the "e" and paused before "mail."
That summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. "Things are changing so fast," my father said. "Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir." Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been "in" Ankara that day, so I didn't really pay attention.
On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The "address" had my last name in it-Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. "The g is silent," I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn't understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.
"You plug it into the wall," said the girl behind the table.
Insofar as I'd had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn't know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with "Dear" and "Sincerely"; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you-all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, register for student loans. They showed you a video about a recent college graduate who broke his leg and defaulted on his student loans, proving that the budget he drew up was no good: a good budget makes provisions for debilitating injury. The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn't include "ratatouille" or "Tasmanian devil."
On the staircase approaching my room, I could hear tuneless singing and the slap of plastic slippers. My new roommate, Hannah, was standing on a chair, taping a sign that read Hannah Park's Desk over her desk, chanting monotonously along with Blues Traveler on her Discman. When I came in, she turned in a pantomime of surprise, pitching to and fro, then jumped noisily to the floor and took off her headphones.
"Have you considered mime as a career?" I asked.
"Mime? No, my dear, I'm afraid my parents sent me to Harvard to become a surgeon, not a mime." She blew her nose loudly. "Hey-my bank didn't give me a dictionary!"
"It doesn't have ‘Tasmanian devil,' " I said.
She took the dictionary from my hands, rifling the pages. "It has plenty of words."
I told her she could have it. She put it on the shelf next to the dictionary she had gotten in high school, for being the valedictorian. "They look good together," she said. I asked if her other dictionary had "Tasmanian devil." It didn't. "Isn't the Tasmanian devil a cartoon character?" she asked, looking suspicious. I showed her the page in my other dictionary that had not just "Tasmanian devil," but also "Tasmanian wolf," with a picture of the wolf glancing, a bit sadly, over its left shoulder.
Hannah stood very close to me and stared at the page. Then she looked right and left and whispered hotly in my ear, "That music has been playing all day long."
"What music?...
I didn't know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would "have" it. "You'll be so fancy," said my mother's sister, who had married a computer scientist, "sending your e . . . mails." She emphasized the "e" and paused before "mail."
That summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. "Things are changing so fast," my father said. "Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir." Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been "in" Ankara that day, so I didn't really pay attention.
On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The "address" had my last name in it-Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. "The g is silent," I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn't understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.
"You plug it into the wall," said the girl behind the table.
Insofar as I'd had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn't know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with "Dear" and "Sincerely"; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you-all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, register for student loans. They showed you a video about a recent college graduate who broke his leg and defaulted on his student loans, proving that the budget he drew up was no good: a good budget makes provisions for debilitating injury. The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn't include "ratatouille" or "Tasmanian devil."
On the staircase approaching my room, I could hear tuneless singing and the slap of plastic slippers. My new roommate, Hannah, was standing on a chair, taping a sign that read Hannah Park's Desk over her desk, chanting monotonously along with Blues Traveler on her Discman. When I came in, she turned in a pantomime of surprise, pitching to and fro, then jumped noisily to the floor and took off her headphones.
"Have you considered mime as a career?" I asked.
"Mime? No, my dear, I'm afraid my parents sent me to Harvard to become a surgeon, not a mime." She blew her nose loudly. "Hey-my bank didn't give me a dictionary!"
"It doesn't have ‘Tasmanian devil,' " I said.
She took the dictionary from my hands, rifling the pages. "It has plenty of words."
I told her she could have it. She put it on the shelf next to the dictionary she had gotten in high school, for being the valedictorian. "They look good together," she said. I asked if her other dictionary had "Tasmanian devil." It didn't. "Isn't the Tasmanian devil a cartoon character?" she asked, looking suspicious. I showed her the page in my other dictionary that had not just "Tasmanian devil," but also "Tasmanian wolf," with a picture of the wolf glancing, a bit sadly, over its left shoulder.
Hannah stood very close to me and stared at the page. Then she looked right and left and whispered hotly in my ear, "That music has been playing all day long."
"What music?...
