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Loading... The Idiot (edition 2017)by Elif Batuman (Author)
Work InformationThe Idiot by Elif Batuman
  
Books Read in 2021 (167) » 18 more Top Five Books of 2017 (138) Top Five Books of 2023 (144) Top Five Books of 2018 (285) Books Read in 2017 (1,631) Books Read in 2020 (1,998) Books Read in 2018 (2,184) sad girl books (2) Academia in Fiction (86) To Read (639) Phoebe Bridgers (25) sad girl books (32) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) escapinginpaper | May 18, 2024 |   ) i. | Apr 17, 2024 |  ) deborahee | Feb 23, 2024 | Selin has a crush on a fellow student named Ivan and they develop an online relationship in the dawn of the email age. They arenât sure how to translate whatâs online to real life and they canât really figure out how they feel or where they fit in the world. But they have SOMETHING thatâs intense and important to both of them but also extremely confusing and whatever it is makes them both feel like the title Idiot. I struggled reading this but eventually I felt better about it. ( ) hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |  ) Okies | Jan 21, 2024 |
 The sermonic version of The Idiot might conclude with this: if power compromises love, and sex involves power, then sex always compromises love. To be intoxicated by someoneâs power is to allow your love for them to be compromised. True love will not save you: the truer the love the deeper the compromise. I donât think Selin sees a way out of this predicament. In one respect, The Idiot, a debut novel by Elif Batuman, staff writer at the New Yorker, is an expansion of the Hungary-based segment of her nonfiction The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Ironically, however, it strikes you as throwaway material that didnât merit inclusion in that well-received work. Itâs mostly bland and boring. At over 400 pages, it also feels interminable...Ultimately, you cannot but wonder why Batuman wrote such a meandering and listless novel. Because it reflects her real-life experiences? If so, the author would do well to emulate a minor character in The Idiot, who, unlike Selin and a friend of hers, âdoesnât compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story.  Elif Batumanâs first novel, âThe Idiot,â is in part about the unlikely and consuming crush that Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, develops on an older mathematics student from Hungary during her freshman year at Harvard. It is unclear, for hundreds of pages, whether this crush is requited. Meanwhile the reader, palm crushed into forehead, thinks, âPoor Selin, what are you doing to yourself?â..Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. âThe Idiotâ builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast... After 100 pages, I was done with Ivan and wanted Selin to be done, too....There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogolâs...this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one. Fiction, like love, is strange.  Now sheâs continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot...A summary of this kind makes the novel sound like a treatise, which is exactly what it is not. The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selinâs friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice. Elif Batuman interview: âI thought racism and sexism were over. I was in for a rude awakeningâ Read more The likability tends to be confined to the female characters, however...A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s Belongs to SeriesSelin Karadag (1) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: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 Ive 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 beautyand 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. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.58)
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