The Idiot

i loved this but i also cant imagine literally anyone else enjoying this

to say the humor is dry feels like a gross understatement, but it definitely plays into the idea that selin is a naive college freshman and these awkward situations and their consequently dry humor were incredibly amusing to me

i think this is just your average coming of age story, except pretentious (think sally rooney but less weird occurrences). it follows a very typical american 4 year college experience where in your freshman year youre meeting a gazillion new people, getting exposed to a lot of ideas and thoughts that make you pretentious, and falling for the first person to give you a smidgen of attention (like, obsessively falling for)

then the trip through europe was fun, especially for an inexperienced american. the language is nice because it generally lacks any judgment, as though you as the reader are meant to draw your own conclusions.

i absolutely do not recommend this book however unless all of the above appeals to you, and you don't mind 400 pages of it

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't. It was so hyped up for me – Pulitzer prize finalist, raving reviews in publications I respect, and a pretty solid back-cover description. But hard as I tried, I just couldn't get into it.

Synopsis: a young girl from New Jersey of Turkish heritage arrives at Harvard in the early 90s. She focuses her first year of classes on Russian and linguistics. She meets an older student, the brooding intellectual type, in one of her classes, and quickly becomes entranced by him. They develop a stilted and undefined relationship that meanders through the rest of the novel in a very unsatisfying manner, through the end of the school year to a summer abroad in Paris and weirdly, rural Hungary.

Roxane Gay wrote that it's both easy to read and hard to read, and I agree with that. On the surface, the words themselves are accessible. The dialogue is quite simple. Nothing in the plot is overtly complex. But there are deep intellectual layers that make you think hard (too hard?) about language: its power, its limits, and its capacity for infinite strangeness. Reading this book felt like being in a foreign country where everyone speaks English as their second language; it's easy to understand what everyone is saying, but at the same time, so much feels obscured, absurd, and lost in translation.

I think one could extract a lot of interesting concepts and discussions from this novel, and it did make me think, but I won't be revisiting this book, or this author, anytime soon. Overall, a disappointment.

It was very promising, in the beginning, I liked the writing and I was interested enough in following Selin around....until I wasn't. It's taken me months to finish it because the last 2/3 basically bored me to death. This book did not have to be this long for what it was. I'm not upset I gave it a shot though.

This is a novel about a young woman's first year of college. Her name is Selin, she's Turkish-American, and she goes to Harvard and enrolls somewhat haphazardly in a bunch of classes she doesn't know anything about. That much could be a synopsis of the entire novel actually: she follows her curiosity, almost in spite of her self doubt and her awkwardness. She follows her curiosity doggedly. One of the places it leads her is into a stilted relationship with an older Hungarian math student who is about to graduate. She allows him to enroll her in a program that sends her to Hungary for the summer, where she is supposed to live in a village and teach English to schoolchildren.

I loved Selin, although I struggled with seeing her as passive, allowing things to happen to her when she could have taken a more active role. One of the things I admired about her was her willingness to see would happen as she let each situation play out (no spoilers, but there aren't any awful situations here). Her observations are so funny, and seem to come from such a fresh perspective, that she really is a delight.

Also, I guess I should read Dostoevsky's The Idiot now, to see what the references are.

A great evocation of early adulthood when everybody but you seems to have figured life out and you are lacking any chill whatsoever. And all that made even worse by the university environment, a weird purgatory between school and “real life”. This definitely brought back memories.

The book's also about language and the narratives we form for ourselves. And it's a look back at a very particular moment in time, when the world wide web and email were just starting out (though this handled with a very light touch). But the main appeal of this novel is no doubt Selin, the narrator, and her deadpan wit. It was a real pleasure spending time with her (though maybe a bit too much time, the book was a tad too long for me).

I've been meaning to give this book another chance because I really, really wanted to like it - and yet I found it impossible to finish last time around. A passive and introverted main character is a pretty common writing choice, but in this book it was extremely burdensome. Selin's inner reflections mostly led absolutely nowhere and left me hoping for more conclusiveness. Perhaps I would have understood "the point" of this book had I been able to finish it, but nothing in the story - or lack thereof - compelled me to keep reading. The similarities with the author's personal background make me wonder whether too much self-insertion is the root of this book's weaknesses.

In a review of a different novel, I scoffed at the idea of writing a book about college students on the premise that they are all awful (they are). I am not opposed to protagonists being bad people, but I do insist that I care about them. Generally speaking, college students care so much about themselves that it is hard to inspire a reader to do the same. Batuman has done a fantastic job of surmounting this obstacle in The Idiot, and her primary tool in doing so is the blinding specificity of the narrator's voice. I don't know that I have ever understood and empathized with a character in literature as well as I did Selin. Other reviewers have complained that “nothing happens,” but while I would agree that the plot is pretty staid, I am an absolute sucker for this type of book. The Idiot reminded me of The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis; My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard; and The Rum Diary, by Hunter S. Thompson, and it just might be the best of the lot.

2.5/5

If you like cleopatra and frankenstein by coco mellors then you'll probably enjoy this. but i did not like c&f so i did not like this either.

I enjoyed reading about selin's college experience, her detailed descriptions of her courses and how she felt about university altogether. one of the reasons i actually read this book.

what i did not like was the main character herself. she was as the title said “the idiot”. how did she get into harvard if she is such a dumbass? she is so fucking boring and dull. she has no interesting thoughts, there is nothing happening for her. 400 pages were of her talking about herself, her thoughts, that basically were trying to articulate how to deal with Ivan. And dear god!!! Ivan was the worst. Ivan is a good example of incel. he had a girlfriend, but then she would be ex-girlfriend, then girlfriend again. he flirted with selin nonstop. he tried to get her to take off her clothes every chance he got. he used her for his own pleasure. svetlana was right, he was using her for an experiment because she was easy.

a booktuber said that this is basically a memoir for the author herself. she is a diaspora and it fucking shows in this book. she constantly talks about turkey in the context that it colonized hungary that you would think shes apologizing to the hungarian people which is fine, but why is it redundantly mentioned in every other paragraph. she made the love interest be from the said country and would constantly talk about how turkey invaded and left traces in hungary. in the second part of the book, she constantly mentions this. here are some things she said that bothered me:

“If it wasn't for the Islamic obsession with baths, then there might not be a public bath tradition in Budapest,”

and here is something ivan said that deeply bothered me:

“I'm not saying I would kill anyone. I just have violent thoughts on the tram, and it helps me relate to Dostoevsky. You never have such thoughts”

this book is mentioned under “if ur feeling lost in your 20s” and it doesnt do anything to help me feel better. maybe except that i am glad i am not selin, and i am not in love with someone like ivan.

this book sucked

Look, this was beautifully written, I can't lie. But do not read this if your patience is extremely thin and hate no-plot books. This took me almost a month to slog through. I actually do love no-plot books and I was really feeling the vibes, especially during the first half of the book. By the middle up to the end, though, I found it super hard to finish and I didn't enjoy the Hungary part as much as I wanted to. Still loved it, but really put me through a reading slump.

this one i struggled with. i was really into the style of writing in the beginning of the novel, but less than halfway through, the choppiness and dry irony and monologues on random topics got to be less endearing. very much a no plot all vibes kind of novel. excellent writing and character building, just not my style, probably would've enjoyed it more had it been shorter