The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A new kind of coming-of-age narrative that reminds readers that to be American is to be from elsewhere. This is a brilliant, hilarious and moving novel that will resonate for some time.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction• A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Nominated 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143111061
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	4,573
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Read an Excerpt

Fall
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Idiot"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Elif Batuman.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

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

“Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . .  Batuman’s writing is funny and deadpan, and Selin’s observations tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship, social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will quietly amuse and provoke thought.” —Huffington Post 

“Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.” —People

“Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is a sentimental education, it’s one leavened by a great deal of mordant and delightful humor. . . . At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, The Idiot’ is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman.” —Boston Globe 

“The Idiot is an impressive debut with a ridiculous amount of charm and a protagonist so relatable she’s almost impossible to forget.” —A.V. Club

“The Idiot is wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection The Possessed (2010), has brave and original ideas about what a 'novel' might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language . . . . It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone who’s successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her protagonist’s intellectual vertigo with maturity and common sense.” —Slate

“Beautifully written first novel . . . Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to sketching character . . . The novel fairly brims with provocative ideas about language, literature and culture.” —The Associated Press

“A vibrant novel of ideas . . . Like her essays, Batuman’s Bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection The Possessed, Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st century’s great love letters to reading . . . It was a tour de force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary obsession . . . A different—though no less tenuous—variety of possession is explored in The Idiot, Batuman’s first novel . . . The book’s pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent, she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely observed world . . . Selin’s is a consciousness one does not want to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend. 'I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time,' she writes, 'the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.' Batuman articulates those little moments—of revelation and of emptiness—as well as anyone writing today. The book’s legacy seems destined to be one of observation, not character—though when the observer is this gifted, is that really any wonder?” —LA Times

“No one writes funnier or more stylishly about higher education. Nothing written about grad school is as entertaining as her 2010 collection of dispatches from Stanford's comparative-literature department, The Possessed, and her studied satire of Harvard in The Idiot is nearly its equal.” —Village Voice

“Batuman’s sardonic wit makes for a delectable unfolding of Selin’s experience of love, life and language.” —BBC.com 

"Batuman’s novel is roaringly funny. It is also intellectually subtle, surprising, and enlightening. It is a book fueled by deadpan wonder." —New York Review of Books

“Charming, hilarious and wise debut novel . . . Batuman titled the book The Idiot (after Dostoevsky’s famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor, silly idiot, she seems to be saying. The Idiot, a novel of innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude that Dag Hammarskjöld expressed in his memoir Markings, 'For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!'” —Dallas News

“The Idiot is half The Education of Henry Adams and half Innocents Abroad. Twain would have savored Selin's first international trip to Paris, Hungary and Turkey . . . Our first footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be missed." —Shelf Awareness 

“Selin is entrancing—so smart, so clueless, so funny—and Batuman’s exceptional discernment,
comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a self.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Wonderful first novel . . . Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible ‘to be sincere without sounding pretentious,’ and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

“Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. Readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred) 

“Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years.” —Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir, Lit, and The Liars’ Club

“I’m not Turkish, I don’t have a Serbian best friend, I’m not in love with a Hungarian, I don’t go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.” —Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You

“Elif Batuman’s novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.” —Joseph O’Neill, author of The Dog and Netherland
 
“Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique Bildungsroman: one more fascinated with what’s going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what’s going on inside her.” —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor

From the Publisher

…a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book…It lopes along like a highbrow episode of Louie, a series of silly, surreal, confident riffs about humiliations, minor and major. It is a rejoinder to the pressure on literature to serve as self-help, to make us empathetic or better informed, to be useful. Here, fiction's only mandate is to exploit the particular freedom afforded by the form—to coast on the charm and peculiar sensibility of our narrator, Selin, "an American teenager, the world's least interesting and dignified kind of person"…Batuman is an energetic and charming writer…there is more oxygen, more life in this book, than in a shelf of its peers. And in the way of the best characters, Batuman's creations are not bound by the book that created them. They seem released into the world. Long after I finished The Idiot, I looked at every lanky girl with her nose in a book on the subway and thought: Selin.

The New York Times Book Review - Parul Sehgal

It's memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 01/02/2017
The mysterious relationship between language and the world” is just one of the questions troubling Selin Karadag, the 18-year-old protagonist of Batuman’s (The Possessed) wonderful first novel, a bildungsroman Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence. Beginning her first year at Harvard in the fall of 1995, Selin is determined to “be a courageous person, uncowed by other people’s dumb opinions”; she already thinks of herself as a writer, although “this conviction was completely independent of having ever written anything.” In a Russian class, the Turkish-American Selin is befriended by the worldlier Svetlana, whose Serbian family has endowed her with capital and complexes, and the older Hungarian math major Ivan, who becomes Selin’s correspondent in an exciting new medium: email. Their late-night exchanges inspire Selin more than anything else in her life, but they frustrate her, too: Ivan’s intentions toward her are vague, perhaps even to himself. Traveling to Paris with Svetlana in the summer of 1996, Selin plans to continue on to Hungary, where she will teach English in a village school, and then to Turkey, where her extended family resides. Thus Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible “to be sincere without sounding pretentious,” and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2016
In this semiautobiographical debut novel, New Yorker writer and National Book Critics Circle finalist Batuman delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience. The story is set in the early 1990s, when Selin, a first-generation Turkish American girl from New Jersey, is introduced simultaneously to both email and Harvard. In Russian 101, she makes friends with Svetlana, a worldly Serbian emigré, and falls for handsome Hungarian upperclassman Ivan. Ivan's affection is elusive—he already has a girlfriend—and their relationship consists primarily of a plaintive yet intellectual email correspondence while Ivan travels about exploring graduate schools. To see Ivan over the summer, Selin commits to teaching English in Hungary. The unfamiliar language gives rise to a succession of seemingly random but mild misadventures. Despite its allusive title, this work is more modern fiction than Russian novel. The narrative is highly detailed and determinedly linear (compare Karl Ove Knausgaard or Ben Lerner), while the voice is lighthearted and wry, with occasional laugh-out-loud zingers. VERDICT Most readers will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

The author of this book narrates as 18-year-old Turkish-American Selin begins her first year at Harvard. It’s 1995, and Selin strives to be an ethical person who thinks independently, unaffected by others’ opinions. A likable young woman who is coping with frustrations and confused emotions, Selin meets several original characters, including Serbian Svetlana, Hungarian Ivan, and American Ralph, who is obsessed with the Kennedy family. The audiobook would have been better served by a more professional narration, as the author’s isn’t as colorful as her novel. There are long passages in which nothing happens, yet the novel is filled with affecting vignettes and strange conversations. As Selin understands her limitations and awakens to her possibilities, Batuman’s observations are dark, satiric, and very funny. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

The author of this book narrates as 18-year-old Turkish-American Selin begins her first year at Harvard. It’s 1995, and Selin strives to be an ethical person who thinks independently, unaffected by others’ opinions. A likable young woman who is coping with frustrations and confused emotions, Selin meets several original characters, including Serbian Svetlana, Hungarian Ivan, and American Ralph, who is obsessed with the Kennedy family. The audiobook would have been better served by a more professional narration, as the author’s isn’t as colorful as her novel. There are long passages in which nothing happens, yet the novel is filled with affecting vignettes and strange conversations. As Selin understands her limitations and awakens to her possibilities, Batuman’s observations are dark, satiric, and very funny. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2016-12-06
A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1. It's fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, "Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent." When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman's (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author's thematic concerns and style. Selin's closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin's first romantic entanglement—which begins via electronic mail—is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language—and languages—can and cannot do. This isn't just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: "we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale—albeit without morphemes." Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.

Kirkus Reviews