Elif Batuman

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard and finds herself dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood. She studies linguistics and literature, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language - and languages - can and cannot do. Along the way she befriends Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb, and obsesses over Ivan, a mathematician from Hungary. Selin ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape who we are, how difficult it is to be a failed writer, and how baffling love is. At once clever and clueless, Batuman?s heroine shows us with perfect hilarity and soulful inquisitiveness just how messy it can be to forge a self.

The Idiot

"An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down." --Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You "Easily the funniest book I've read this year." --GQ 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.

sofia mae

I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.

The highest law, higher than Holy Scripture, was "the intuition of a native speaker," a law you couldn't find in any grammar book or program into any computer.

Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naïve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.

Arie P

“I also put somethings in a bowl but at the end it wasn’t a salad, it was just a lot of random things in a bowl.”

“They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this vire, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real.”

This reminded me of my 9th grade physics class where my partner and I got different answers and we were confused because we thought we'd done every single calculation the same. The teacher came by and said we both were right, the difference was negligible. How can difference be negligible? If it it is so small, so insignificant, how is it that we identify it as a difference at all? When does the insignificance grow into something worth calling a difference?

“You say you’re not in the mood for insignificant subtleties. But insignificant subtleties are the only difference between something special, and a huge pile of garbage floating through space.”

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.” —Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You “Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ 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

A Novel

sina (she/her) 

The women's shower room in the dormitory was a big tiled box with no stalls, just a row of showerheads. "It looks just like in a movie about a concentration camp!" Dawn exclaimed, pulling her shirt over her head and stepping out of her panties. I swallowed back a sigh. The hits never stopped coming in adult life.

Were Germans supposed to be particularly ordered and machinelike? Was it possible that Germans really were ordered and machinelike? 

There was a quantitative reasoning test full of melancholy word problems - "The graph models the hypothetical mass in grams of a broiler chicken up to eighty weeks of age" - and every evening was some big meeting where you sat on the floor and learned that you were now a little fish in a big sea, and were urged to view this circumstance as an exhilarating challenge rather than a source of anxiety. I tried not to give too much weight to the thing about the fish, but after a while it started to get me down anyway. It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard where she signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student. 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. When the school year ends, Ivan goes to Budapest and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside. Her summer does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of college students, but rather is the beginning of 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.

 wen

Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I’m not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They’re always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it’s really limited.

Fredo Moreno

In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Dora Tominic

I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn't think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

Syrina

“As long as there are beginning English students and a lake and I can see a mountain, I will be perfectly happy,” she said, reminding me of how my grandfather used to say he was a simple man with simple tastes: “ all I need is a little milk from a goat that has been fed for a month on wild green pears.”

Magdalena

How were you supposed to talk anout people?

It wasn't that I was a child exactly, but I didn't really have a history as anything else. 

Connie Meade

Helen 

Riley

i think if i knew selin irl she would piss me off because she doesnt do anything. she just goes through life doing whatever she wants at Harvard of all places. She feels guilt using her parents money but doesnt get a job for a sense of freedom. But I also understand her on a fundamental level. She doesn’t know what to do. She sees someone who might have all the answers and lives an interesting life and obsesses over him. I find an Ivan and think about how he can change my life even if I dont know him that well. I want him but my own desire scares me. I dont even realize I want him until hes not around. I feel like that often. Im happy she is freed from him at the end, it just wasnt good for her.

ashwee

a little bit too slow, not a lot happening inbetween and I feel like the book could be a bit more concise, detail-wise. most of the time it felt like I was reading nothing

𝑂𝑑𝑖𝑙𝑒

I am getting tired of novels that start in one place and then go to another place to fit the pacing and end the story somewhere near the second place or perhaps even in a third place! That edit said this one was done well and the second place was good and so was the first place. Loved that way things were said and dialogue was delivered as if nothing was written, very cool and hard to do imo.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

hm. i think if i read this a freshman I would've killed myself. a little too close to comfort on the lows of the college experience. you never really do have an original experience I guess. no plot, more like a vague recollection of dreams throughout, again much like freshman year. 

" thing your therapist says but you don't believe her, but its the truth. I laughed a lot and Selin felt so real, I missed her the moment I finished the book.

This book is like the "everyone's feeling just like you are" thing your therapist says but you don't believe her, but its the truth. I laughed a lot and Selin felt so real, I missed her the moment I finished the book.

If you know me or know me in passing and you are still on the fence on whether I am prententious, I hope this gives you an answer.

This novel spoke to them and it spoke to me beautifully. My university experience was nothing like Selin's, yet it was everything <i>like it</i>. Batuman manages to capture a very specific coming-of-age experience in such a precise manner that it makes me feel like I must have gone to university together. It is the feeling of disorientation and the nearly unconscious seeking for a deeper meaning and being lead on and leading yourself on, both determined and directionless.

I know it may seem like not a lot happens in this novel, that the detail with which she goes through that freshman year of Selin's life, is tedious but I really, really did not find it so. Batuman's prose also helps the pace and rhythm of the novel. It is light and humorous in a way that comes off as earnest. I am repeating myself but it truly felt like spending a year with a uni friend and perhaps this is what really won me over.

If you know me or know me in passing and you are still on the fence on whether I am prententious, I hope this gives you an answer.

This novel spoke to them and it spoke to me beautifully. My university experience was nothing like Selin's, yet it was everything <i>like it</i>. Batuman manages to capture a very specific coming-of-age experience in such a precise manner that it makes me feel like I must have gone to university together. It is the feeling of disorientation and the nearly unconscious seeking for a deeper meaning and being lead on and leading yourself on, both determined and directionless.

I know it may seem like not a lot happens in this novel, that the detail with which she goes through that freshman year of Selin's life, is tedious but I really, really did not find it so. Batuman's prose also helps the pace and rhythm of the novel. It is light and humorous in a way that comes off as earnest. I am repeating myself but it truly felt like spending a year with a uni friend and perhaps this is what really won me over.

I appreciate the writing, and especially the first half is ironic-fun-hilarious, but the second half was just very repetitive. Not a fan of the dynamic between Selin and Ivan either. 

(3.5) I relate to selin as an aspiring writer and looking for love. Anyways, the harvard part is giving gilmore girls vibe but ivan kinda annoys me...

funny book. i liked first half better before she entirely devolved into pining, but their relationship made sense to me in a way that most romance in novels does not so i allow it.

yasi

Chris Dailey

Funny, borderline absurd recounting a forlorn relationship(?) and freshman year at Harvard. Set in the earlier email era, we follow Selin, a freshman at Harvard that takes, along with her classmates, an alchemy of unrelated classes while she falls hard for a senior on his way the Cal for a PhD. Topics of foreignness, education, love, hyper-intellectualism, sex, and elitism are handled with a biting wit. While it was somewhat plotless and could drag on, it was humorous throughout and was also was full of human tenderness.

Sohini Roy

their dynamic is still strange to me but i am appreciating the writing so much more the second time. my kind of humor

armoni mayes

I have heard mostly great things about The Idiot for the past two years when i began reading journey. It was advertised as a ‘hot girl book’ and a ‘sad girl book’ when that was still a big trend on booktok, but just in general a highly recommended read. All this to say, i thought it would be right up my alley–but that was so far from the truth. 

In The Idiot we follow a 18-year-old freshman at Harvard named Selin that inevitably wants to become a writer one day. The novel is told in a vignette style way with a few transitions from spring to summer etc. I believe that just added to the unbearableness of the entire novel. I want to preface this by saying i LOVE a ‘no-plot-just-vibes’ book, i mean my favorite novel of all time is MYORAR by Ottessa Moshfegh. This was just one of the most boring and confusing pieces of literature I have ever read and absolutely needed to be 100 pages shorter.

We are sold a possible unrequited love on the book blurb, and yet, we get crumbs of that. The entire book is just us following this girl through the most mundane and menial tasks. The first 2/3rds of the book is just us going to language classes with her and every single convo she has with anyone else is about foreign language. It seemed like the author wanted to write a non fiction about language but went for fiction for some ungodly known reason. 

This book is about foreign language and linguistics and occasionally an unrequited love for a boy that really only also talks about language. They were emailing each other at some points and the emails, though in english, made me feel like i needed a translator because they were so confusing. 

I did enjoy some parts of the book, but i just have an overall negative view of it as a whole because i think Batuman just wanted to write the worlds most boring novel.

i found the characters in this book really funny and unique and even though there is nothing really ‘special’ about this book as you just follow selin’s life and read about her thoughts and internal struggles, i still think it’s really interesting and you honestly learn a lot from the world’s history, languages or just about anything because the characters talk about these topics a lot in general

micki

Heather Margaret

I felt while I was reading that Elif had such a simple way of writing that it was way above me. I don't know how to explain it but the effortlessness of the way she brought this story together was so strong that it felt so god damn smart. I hate Ivan and I hate men like him, being careless with women's hearts and minds. I wanted to shake Selin so many times and tell her she is being her own enemy. I love this story. I love the heartbreak. I love the stinging ending.

Elisavet Rozaki 

EDIT: I gave this one more star because I was looking at my notes and realised how amazing Batuman's prose is! 

Relatable character but boring plot.

amari

Maria

overall, yes, nothing much happens in this book, which i notice is the main critique against it. it is a very internally-focused novel, centered around selin's thoughts and attempts to make sense of the world around her, on who she is & those around her. selin's narrative voice is very unique and insightful, i loved the interplay between language and life. i think, overall, batuman does a very good job of describing the awkward transition into adulthood, with all its confusion. that being said, i don't think it's a novel that you would just devour, so if you're looking for a fast-paced, plot-driven coming of age story this isn't it, but i am very glad i took my sweet time with it. i will be checking out either/or!

Rosa

I read this back in December. At the time, the first half of the book resonated so heavily with me that I expected the second half too as well, and when it didn't, I was disappointed. Coming back to it, I wanted to give it more of a chance than I did the first time.

I still enjoy Either/Or better than The Idiot. The first half of this book is still better to me than the second. But Selin no longer seems like a total pushover to me like how she did the first time I read it. I'm more sympathetic to her now -- something I probably should have been in the first place, considering how similar to her I feel. I still don't find the novel funny as a defining characteristic, but there are funny pieces. Batuman has the ability to write passages that are both factual and feel like they should be metaphorically applicable to any number of situations, in the world and in my case, in my personal life. Bumped up a little on the rating.

I don't understand why this was labeled funny. I found it rather unnerving -- the first third or so was a bit too close to my current life to feel comfortable. But even if that wasn't the case, this isn't a funny book. Selin, who I originally semi-related to, became a total doormat within the first half of the book. It was sad to watch her in all of these relationships with other people, almost never able to assert herself. But in any case, it was engaging. It might be my motivation to go to Istanbul for fall break next year.

one of the funniest books of all time about linguistics and first love and being 18 and murphy’s fucking law, let me tell you. selin is an autist also. non-negotiable.

lauren amitirigala

Isabella 

loved it especially the writing but it was too long

Great read that show cases the past quite well and how complex yet simple life is everywhere you go. 

Naveen Sheik

D D D 

Started off slow but then I was reading 100pages/day. I really enjoyed this book. It felt impossible to put down towards the end. I think I was hoping to find some answer to a question I've had for a while. 

I've said enough about this in my updates, but I felt so moved by this depiction of a very particular type of crush. Where it's all about power. When you really have nothing to say but you're overcome with desire. Where you're suffering so much for ****SOME REASON****. Where you're not having conversations at all, you're doing something better . Ivan was exactly the type of guy I had this crush on: intelligent, pretentious, aloof, confused, had a girlfriend. Felt very true to being 19.

“it can be really exasperating to look back at your past. what’s the matter with you? i want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. if i did that, she would probably cry. maybe i would cry, too.”

Enjoyed it because I lived it.. I could see how those who didn't wouldn't. 
4 stars from me :)

The Idiot

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