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    The Idiot
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    The Idiot
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    The Idiot
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Idiot

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 14, 2017
    ISBN9781524734947
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Idiot

    3.5/5

    270 ratings25 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I was starting to feel like an Idiot myself for continuing to read this thing for as long as I did. I was starting to think it would literally never end - I was reading it on an e-reader, and I was afraid that at some point we had finished with the character's past, and we were now picking up with the author's life in real time. That's how it felt after a while - someone just narrating each and every thing that happened to her and the related (or not) thought that went through her head. Spoiler ahead. It might have been worth it the two main characters had even made it first base eventually. What was that all ABOUT?
    • 5/5
      THE IDIOT is, I think, Elif Batuman's first novel, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. And I can see why. It is a book wise beyond its author's years, a coming-of-age story that kept me chuckling, if not laughing out loud, on so many occasions that I lost count. But sometimes it's a rueful sort of laugh, over situations that tug at your heartstrings and make you want to reassure Selin, the 18-19 year-old protagonist, maybe even give her a hug and tell her not to worry, that things will get better. Like the author, Selin Karadag is the daughter of Turkish emigrants, and we follow her through her first year at Harvard, and then an eventful summer spent in France, Hungary and Turkey. Selin is infinitely inquisitive, intelligent, timid, and perhaps a bit strait-laced - a "good girl" in every sense of that phrase, and a total innocent. A linguistics major, Selin thinks she wants to be a writer. It is the mid-90s, before cell phones, texting and personal hand-held "devices." But the age of email has begun, and every Harvard freshman is given an account, which they can access on their own desktop computers or strategically placed PCs around the campus. We meet her quirky roommates and her best friend, Svetlana, a Serb. But, most importantly, there is Ivan, a tall Hungarian mathematics student, a senior, and Selin falls hard for him. But her feelings and emotions are all over the place during this year-long narrative. After reading Neruda's "Ode to the Atom," Selin is enchanted by "the seduction of the atom." As Ivan explains it -"Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore."Selin's own passage from innocence is a long, slow one. A minor character even notes that Selin has "a bright, striking look, like a child's." In fact her innocence remains stubbornly intact throughout this lengthy novel. But I'll leave that journey for other readers to enjoy. As I so thoroughly enjoyed it, charmed by the innocence and the humor. Here's Selin's take on observing students cramming and struggling through exams that made me laugh -"The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them."Made me laugh again, just typing it. In another passage, Selin is describing her guest room in a home in the Hungarian village where she is teaching English to children. The room has a bed, a desk, a vase of goldenrods, and "a little snarling stuffed weasel." Her hostess offered to move the weasel, afraid that Selina might be frightened by it. But Selin demurs, thinking, "It seemed clear to me that if you really wanted to be a writer, you didn't send away the weasel." Her hostess, doubtful, says -"'Are you sure you won't be frightened when you wake up?,' Margit asked. 'Oh, no,' I said. I was frightened when I woke up."Yes, funny. And there's our heroine watching a gay pride parade in Paris and wondering where the tall drag queens get such stunning shoes (Selin wears a hard-to-find women's size 11). Also funny, and maybe a bit wistful. But at the heart of the story is the oh-so-slowly evolving love story of Selin and Ivan, who finally tells her, "I always knew this thing between us was really delicate." And it is that - so very delicate. Seen from Selin's own perspective, bewildered by her new-found feelings, she self-evaluates -"... I really didn't know how to do anything real. I didn't know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn't just a self-improvement project."But the truth is, Selin knows how to do more than she thinks. And one thing she can and will do is to make many readers fall in love with her. And, by the way, since Batuman's only other book is THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM, I'm sure there must be some parallels here to the Dostoevsky classic, but I'm not even going to try to tackle that. It was enough for me to read THE IDIOT as a delightful, often hilarious, sometimes heart wrenching look at young love in the 1990s. I loved it. My highest recommendation. Oh, and P.S. I hope so much that Ms. Batuman will revisit Selin and Ivan in a sequel one day. Please?- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 4/5
      Selin, a rather sheltered young lady, begins her first year at Harvard and a new world opens to her. Her new friends are from different corners of the globe. Her classes in Russian and linguistics expose her to new cultures and methods of communication but it is the new big deal, e-mail, which teaches her just how difficult it is to express ones feelings with only words, an email voice can be misconstrued. Her attempts to verbally communicate with humans is often awkward and her naive attempts to understand the actions of others is childish. Selin's love interest seems forced and confusing but as a first love, very real.Batuman does a wonderful job in making her characters so very human while at the same time depicting how first year college life can be as exciting or boring as one wishes.The problem is the book is much longer than it needs to be and unfortunately many may give up on it prematurely. For those who tread on, the conclusion is open ended and may not be inspiring yet it is a snapshot in time and is satisfactory, none the less.
    • 4/5
      I liked the first half better than the second half which is different from a lot of reviewers. The first half was really her stream of consciousness. A lot of times I don't like that but this time I found all the topics interesting. The second half was more plot driven and for some reason I didn't get the end.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book so much. I really didn't want it to end and felt myself slowing down my reading to make it last. It is so full of everything. I felt shot back to my college years because Selin was so relatable. It made me laugh out loud over and over - and is so smart and just a wonderful dense, cartwheel of a book. I think it is my favorite book of at least the past 5 years.
    • 5/5
      It's 1995, Selin is a freshman at Harvard and she's chosen an odd mix of classes for herself as she explores how languages work, interact with each other and influence how their speakers think. She has roommates, which is an adjustment, and she meets two people in a beginning Russian class; the enigmatic Hungarian math major, Ivan, and a charismatic Serbian girl named Svetlana. Svetlana forces Selin out into the world of Harvard as she lives her life more colorfully than the careful scholars around her. Selin and Ivan begin a charged email correspondence but Selin is unsure about where their relationship is going, or even if they have a relationship. In the second part of the novel, Selin travels, first to Paris with Svetlana, then to Hungary, where she has signed up to teach English in a rural village at the suggestion of Ivan, and then to visit family in Turkey. This novel hit my reading sweet spot. I do love a well-told story about a person discovering themselves and the wider world when they go off to university. And Selin is an intelligent, curious person to follow as she explores both her new environment and her intellectual world. She is simultaneously cautious and prone to rushing headlong into new situations. She refuses to cede her agency, even when she has no idea what she should do. And the language stuff is fascinating. Selin's an observer and she notices how different languages approach the same object or concept, and how words travel across languages. All of The Idiot was brilliant fun. There were some small bumps in the pacing, but the novel soared as Selin set off on her summer travels. She's a fish out of water, but an intelligent fish who is willing to see what life on land is like. Elif Batuman is a fierce, intelligent writer. I suspect that readers who don't have an interest in language might be less delighted than I was by this wonderful book.
    • 4/5
      I don't read as much fiction as I'd like, and so when I do carve out the time for this big of a contemporary novel, my expectations run high. The Idiot was enjoyable. It took me back to the mid-1990's and yet through the lens of a very different college experience than my own. It's well written. I like Elif Batuman's powerful use of language, especially her ability to create dialogue that seems real and behaviors that seem telling. Linguistics is a central theme of the story and the various characters' perceptions are often influenced by their varying experiences with Turkish, Hungarian, Russian, and English. Batuman's ability to create interactions based on students learning languages made for an interesting read on multiple levels. This approach also allowed her to tell a romantic coming-of-age story in ways that enjoined the reader directly into the characters' experiences as they figured out what each others' words meant.
    • 5/5
      Aside from it having one of my favorite book covers of the year, the Idiot holds some of the best prose of the year so far. Batuman is hilarious, intelligent, and writes a somewhat simple story wrapped in an addicting and stylish frame. Recommended for those looking for funny and smart fiction.
    • 4/5
      The Idiot is remarkable, primarily, for the singular voice of its narrator Selin, who is charming, funny, gnomic, and relatable all at the same time. The Idiot is also remarkable for how Elif Batuman sustains this voice for over 400 pages, without ever really losing any of its charm or humor. But The Idiot is disappointing for how it does not do all that much beyond this. It's a vivid snapshot of a woman in a certain place in a certain year at a certain time of her life, and a beautiful and entertaining snapshot at that. But it's somehow missing that extra oomph of insight that one expects from a great novel. Batuman is without a doubt an author to keep one's eye on; I just suspect that her best work is yet to come.
    • 4/5
      A novel of youth yearning for life, for experience, for making sense of the world by creating stories.
    • 3/5
      Initially observational and humorous in the academic setting the plot rambles in the second half. All around Selin seem to benefit from her friendship and tutoring, but she aimlessly fails to find meaning, purpose, or love in her adopted and actual homes. There is some subtle semiotics and symbolism here, but overall it is a story about how frustrating it is to be young.
    • 5/5
      Selin is a freshman in 1995, learning firsthand the power of email. This book is so, so smart
    • 4/5
      Reading books is my pleasure. I struggled to reach the end of this one. But I did. I feel like I have just crawled over the finish line of a triathlon. Unfortunately, I do not feel that I have gained anything. Selin is a college freshman experiencing her first love. For her, love is not blooming, it is awkward, disturbing and clumsy. She and Ivan communicate with each other best by email which is sterile and flat. When together, they are afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of touching, afraid of sex, afraid of feeling. The prose is a string of stream of consciousness vignettes. Not my thing. Each of the 400 odd pages of this novel drag on for centuries. I have visibly aged these past few days. Thank you Penguin First to Read program for a complimentary copy but I must move on.
    • 2/5
      This is a book about language and communication under the guise of a coming-of-age novel. I actually like it more if I think about it in these terms, because the exploration of linguistics is fascinating. The actual story line, on the other hand, was not as enjoyable. Selin is a Freshman at Harvard University, born in New Jersey to Turkish parents (autobiographical, no?) and currently studying Russian. She becomes infatuated with an older boy in her Russian classes, they exchange some odd emails, then she spends a month in Hungary over the summer under the guise of teaching ESL while actually just trying to be closer to him in his home in Budapest. So, yeah, there's that whole pining-over-a-boy thing, which isn't my, well, thing. The story itself is disjointed and the writing stilted and Hemingway-esque (not in a good way). The book's saving grace is, again, the exploration of language and communication, both in terms of differences between languages but also in terms of spoken vs written language and the nuances that are lost in email. But my gosh are 18-year-olds really that pathetic? Yes, yes they are. Perhaps that is the rub for me - I don't want to remember being this pathetic.Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      There were some engaging parts to the novel, but mostly rather boring.
    • 2/5
      This is so hard to review. The writing is just fine, and I got into the swing of it.But this is just a painfully pretentious book about wealthy pretentious college students. They don;t have jobs. They barely go to class, they barely study. They spend the summer "working" and traveling and "gaining experience". Their dorms are SUITES. Mostly it's navel-gazing about the stories of their lives, and what they want them to be and how to get there. This is actually acknowledged on p 367--so Batuman has her characters recognize this, so I assume SHE recognizes this. That does not make it less exhausting or borderline offensive,How much of this pretentiousness is East coast private school? How much of this is Ivy league private school? How much is East Coast? How much is private school? How much is top university? How much is Americans with very close relatives they can travel to/stay with/have an obligation to visit over breaks?I was in college not long before this (I graduated in 91, when grad students had email but it was not an option for undergrads). Many people still wrote papers by hand, others on typewriters, some by computer. All were acceptable. We had computerized library catalogs AND card catalogs--but neither was a useful as walking the stacks once you got some good numbers to search under.I can relate to none of these people. Maybe Fern, but she is extremely peripheral.
    • 3/5
      After the first 100 pages I was utterly in thrall to Batuman - but then, as is often the way with Literary Novels, the book drifted away just as I hoped it would kick into the next gear. The writing is bleakly hilarious, and the reader can’t help but yearn for Selin to find happiness ... but, of course, she’s too much of an Idiot. The meandering non-plot let me down, but I’m still excited by the news that Batuman is planning a sequel for Selin already.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book, but can’t say exactly why. When I wasn’t read it I was thinking about it; couldn’t wait to get home and read more.
    • 5/5
      I don't think there's any way for me to write a lengthy review of this book without digressing rapidly into navel-gazing introspection, so I'll keep it short.The Idiot was wholly refreshing, not just for its rebellion against plot twists and romantic excitement, but for its honest-to-goodness, real-life, whole human female protagonist. Selin is not defined by the sum of her parts, her physical appearance, her life experiences, or anything else. Instead, she is defining the world and seeking understanding through passive and totally unconscious resistance. (I read one review in which the reader described the main character as devoid of personality and I felt personally attacked.) I LOVED this book unequivocally. I mean, I already want to read it again and I'm not the rereading type.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What an odd book this is. I am pretty certain I don't know more than a person or two who would enjoy it, but it worked for me. Certainly this is a coming-of-age novel, but more than that it is a book about language; it's centrality to culture, to love, to self, to friendship, to understanding, and to obfuscation. Batuman loves good phrases, is really funny, and has a breathtaking mastery of language(s). Our protagonist, Selin (presumably a close approximation of a 19-year-old Batuman) is pathologically over-analytical. I am not throwing stones, I was the same way at 19, but the fact remains that Selin experiences almost nothing in real time. It is as if nothing actually happens until each word spoken is parsed within an inch of its life. And that is a shame since many interesting things occur in Selin's life and one imagines she would not be so flat and dull for most of this story if she allowed herself to ever be in a moment and if she thought more about anything besides (the relentlessly terrible) Ivan and the size of her own feet. Selin though is shaping up to be an interesting adult (regardless that she sees stasis), we can see that. In fact she becomes more interesting in the final pages of the book, not because anything happens, but perhaps because we finally see her someplace where she is comfortable, where she does not have to think about her place or her persona. Recommended for language geeks, but even for us, this book is a tad too long and meandering. I suppose it is hard to edit a series of largely disjointed thoughts and occurrences, but many many many things happen in this book that are just asides - some are weird and hilarious and belong (Selin judging the boys' legs in the school pageant is hilarious)- some are just things that make it harder to follow a story which is already very very hard to follow.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A funny account of being a young woman in the 90s going to college. She's of Turkish descent but grew up in Jersey, studies language and tries to make sense of her Hungarian 'friend' who isn't quite a boyfriend. Not much happens, but its fun being along with her as she tries to understand her life. Here she is reflecting on her experience of being in a new country."Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book . I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. And yet in the next moment it seemed to me that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but the opposite , and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about the way to live, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you, but the one who led you out to more people. "

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The first chapter caught my attention, so I persevered to read it in a span of 2 months.
      I was on a reading slump that time, so even if this is one of my favorites in 2020 I couldn't bring myself to finish it in few days.

      This book inspired me to join a messaging app called Slowly. It takes few hours or days for you to send and receive messages. I like that feature and I used the concepts used in this story.
    • 2/5
      I received an ARC from the publisher for a free and honest review.

      Everyone has their favorite coming-of-age novel. Sadly, there may come a time for some when this sub-genre no longer works. I had high hopes for this novel. However, I just did not care. Lost interest in the characters, found myself rolling my eyes at some of the dialogue. This was not the novel for me. However, I look forward to the author's next novel.
    • 4/5
      This book was weird and wonderful. I laughed out loud a few times. There were some hilariously absurd moments. It reminded me of "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, in that it was full of details that might have seemed unnecessary, but made Selin's voice real.

      It also reminded me of "Franny and Zooey" by J D Salinger (one of my favourite books) because in a way not much happened. This book is probably a book people will love or hate, and they will know which after reading the first thirty or so pages.

      I spotted a few linguistic and literary in-jokes, but I expect I missed a few.

      I would be keen to read more books by Elif Batuman.
    • 4/5
      Elif Batuman captures that excruciating, but elusive limbo that many young women in college find themselves in: the (non) romance with the (non) boyfriend while in the midst of trying to figure out what you are doing with your life. I can relate to Selin's situation in the book, I too had a (non) boyfriend, a guy I met in a Russian history class no less, who flirted with me and spoke to me like he was really into me, but somehow would manage to never really go beyond this constant flirtation, his name was Dave. I was completely dazed and dumbfounded when one day in the university bookstore, as he was trying to tickle me and succeeding, he suddenly stopped and ran after someone. I approached and was introduced to his "long-time" girlfriend of whom he had never mentioned even one word. I went home hopelessly confused, and without being rude (why?!), I tried to give him the cold shoulder the next few days in class. As the days passed however, I was again sucked into believing this could be something, which, of course, it had no chance ever of happening. Much later, I would marvel at what an idiot I had been.While this awkward situation is at the center of Selin's story, there is so much more to love: the strangeness that is college life, the weird otherness that you get from other people when you, though thoroughly American, come originally from another culture, the mispronunciation of your name, the questions that assume you have deep insight into a different world (you don't for the most part), the joy and struggle of learning a completely foreign (as in different alphabet) language, and the loneliness of feeling that everyone else knows something that you don't. I loved every word of this novel.