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The Idiot edition by Elif Batuman Literature Fiction eBooks

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The Idiot edition by Elif Batuman Literature Fiction eBooks

2.5 Stars.

I had a really complicated relationship with this book. On the surface, it appears to have everything I enjoy in a novel—a quirky protagonist, smart insights, dry humor, a character-driven narrative—but if I'm being honest, it was completely tedious and desperate for some more extensive editing.

It's a Bildungsroman story about a Turkish-American girl named Selin who begins her freshman year at Harvard University. Selin is awkward, insecure and unprepared for this next part of her life. She meets Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics major, in one of her classes, and they begin something of a courtship that culminates in her traveling to Hungary that summer to be near him.

It's basically a right of passage for a college-age girl to go through that phase where she falls in love with an intellectually exciting but emotionally inept jerk. And Batuman does a really good job of capturing this to the point of nearly painful nostalgic discomfort for readers like myself who have been through that: the coy back and forth, the anxiety of waiting for that next email, the inevitable disappointment just around the corner.

Selin is a linguistics major, and so language and communication play a big role in both her internal monologue and her relationship with Ivan. Ivan, and the feelings she has for him, are so obscure and perplexing to her that there's a constant sense of disconnect. Again, this is something that felt familiar to me and reminded me of my own college years.

Batuman writes in sharp, incisive prose, and there is clearly a lot of potential in her writing. But I'm not sure how to adequately convey how boring and tedious parts of this book were. We go through every single step of Selin's first year of college and the summer following it, and much of the narrative and dialogue feels completely unnecessary. I skimmed pages and pages of this book because I cared so little about what was happening. I almost bailed on it several times. And then the sky would open and I'd come across a section that I loved. It was a very uneven and frustrating reading experience.

I would have given this a solid 2 stars, but it gets an extra .5 for Batuman's obvious talent.


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The Idiot edition by Elif Batuman Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews

Heard Elif Batuman on NPR and loved her storytelling. How she wrote the book many years ago, put it down, reflected and redirected. I wanted to love the book as much as i did her interview. The book had beautiful prose but was indulgent, slow and at times downright dull
So gently funny and true. I might be biased because I went to a liberal arts college in the late 90s, so some parts of the story's setting felt familiar. But the realest parts of the book were the personalities and psychologies of 19 to 22 year olds trying on the clothes of adulthood. I was transported back into the feelings I hadn't felt in 20 years and recognizing they kinds of personalities I haven't seen in 20 years. A great read.
I am a teacher at an international school, and we chose this for our book club. All of our members were extremely disappointed and found the book incredibly boring. We had high expectations because of the positive reviews it received and because it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, because it definitely did not strike a chord with any of us. As I reread the critical reviews, I am struck by how many described the book as funny, when I thought it was just incredibly irritating. To be fair, I am not from the East Coast and did not attend an Ivy League school, so if that is your background, perhaps it is funny in an insider kind of way. Otherwise, I just wanted to give the narrator a good shake and tell her to stop moping around. I have taught high school for a number of years to students from both extremely privileged backgrounds and the working class, so I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that young people go through a period of trying to find themselves and feeling adrift. However, this book was just exasperating. Most 18- and 19-year-olds have far more ability to enjoy life than these very lucky, privileged, and unbelievably irritating characters do. From my point of view, it spent so much time satirizing the meaninglessness of things, it just never developed any significance of its own. I wanted to like it, but just didn't.
This isn't a book with lots and twists and turns, it's a novel of the mind, an 18-year-old Harvard student. It's basically a novel about gaining confidence, wrapped around an obviously doomed near-relationship. It's a very particular college experience, but it's expertly rendered. I'm ready for Sophomore year.
A lot of readers may describe this book as pedantic or tedious or dull. I understand why they're saying that, but I'll have to disagree for this reason the beauty of this book is in its craft, not its plot. The narrator's idiosyncratic observations about the world, her matter-of-fact exchanges with both close friends and strangers, and her quaint attempts at describing how she's feeling are all so beautifully human that if you resign yourself to the fact that nothing out of the ordinary is going to happen here and there are no "events," you can purely enjoy a funny, authentic narrative voice from a character who is trying to find her place in the world. I found myself underlining about a third of this novel because there is so much brilliance and eloquence. It reminded me of Catcher in the Rye with a much more insightful, mature, compassionate narrator. Besides, when you reach the novel's heartbreaking last paragraph, you realize that form complements function. In other words the novel was designed for nothing to happen. That's kind of the point. Life, more often than not, is just life. The question is can we, like Batuman, find wonder and beauty and humor in it all?

Despite being over 400 pages, this is a whip-quick read. It's broken up into sections that are rarely more than four pages and are often hardly a page. It's a perfect commuting book, if you are often forced to pause, but it could also easily be breezed through in a week or two. I highly, highly recommend it. It left a very positive impression on me.
2.5 Stars.

I had a really complicated relationship with this book. On the surface, it appears to have everything I enjoy in a novel—a quirky protagonist, smart insights, dry humor, a character-driven narrative—but if I'm being honest, it was completely tedious and desperate for some more extensive editing.

It's a Bildungsroman story about a Turkish-American girl named Selin who begins her freshman year at Harvard University. Selin is awkward, insecure and unprepared for this next part of her life. She meets Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics major, in one of her classes, and they begin something of a courtship that culminates in her traveling to Hungary that summer to be near him.

It's basically a right of passage for a college-age girl to go through that phase where she falls in love with an intellectually exciting but emotionally inept jerk. And Batuman does a really good job of capturing this to the point of nearly painful nostalgic discomfort for readers like myself who have been through that the coy back and forth, the anxiety of waiting for that next email, the inevitable disappointment just around the corner.

Selin is a linguistics major, and so language and communication play a big role in both her internal monologue and her relationship with Ivan. Ivan, and the feelings she has for him, are so obscure and perplexing to her that there's a constant sense of disconnect. Again, this is something that felt familiar to me and reminded me of my own college years.

Batuman writes in sharp, incisive prose, and there is clearly a lot of potential in her writing. But I'm not sure how to adequately convey how boring and tedious parts of this book were. We go through every single step of Selin's first year of college and the summer following it, and much of the narrative and dialogue feels completely unnecessary. I skimmed pages and pages of this book because I cared so little about what was happening. I almost bailed on it several times. And then the sky would open and I'd come across a section that I loved. It was a very uneven and frustrating reading experience.

I would have given this a solid 2 stars, but it gets an extra .5 for Batuman's obvious talent.