The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Genre: Literary Fiction
Blurb (on back of book):
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.
MY OPINION: ****
I need to reread this book desperately because I vividly remember loving it but cannot for the life of me remember much beyond that. It’s a book exploring academic imposter syndrome, the immigrant experience, and burnout. I heavily enjoyed it as someone attending a “top university” and undergoing a similar feeling of being “not enough” compared to my peers.
I vividly remember a romance between two characters that honestly should not have been together and that’s all that really stuck out to me. The guy is older than her and they spend half the book communicating via email, very resonant of the time period (1990s). However I remember not enjoying their relationship and finding the man quite irritating.
We follow Selin, a young college woman who is trying to figure out her life as she makes the transition from adolescence to adulthood. I think this book resonates heavily if you’re currently in that transition phase of your life as well, which I am and was at the time of reading this. I do think it can be harder to enjoy if you don’t have a personal connection with Selin’s challenges and experiences.
Not to say the book is hard to follow or boring to read as a non college female. This book stuck out to me because her journey was so close to mine. Linguistics also plays a huge role in this book and anyone who knows me IRL remembers my linguistics major era (and the trauma I went through).
I loved the writing style in this book. It’s very stream of consciousness formatted with Selin’s thoughts being splattered across the page with no copy editing. I enjoy reading such prose because it feels so much more real. I would definitely recommend this book to readers who enjoy literary fiction. It’s not talked about enough.
Main Character: Selin
Sidekick(s): Ivan
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