The Idiot: A Novel

When I put The Idiot on my to be read list, I believed that it was going to be a quirky novel with cultural interests. It is somewhat quirky but Selin's Turkish heritage plays little part in the story and the only references to Turkish culture are about the language. Selin has just started her freshman year at Harvard and tries to make friends while navigating the strange academic environment. In a Russian class, she meets Svetlana and the pair become friends while she begins a friendship with Ivan through an email exchange. Even though the emails coming from Ivan are strange, Selin begins to fall in love with Ivan, even though he already has a girlfriend and is planning on attending graduate school in California a year later.

I couldn't wrap my head around this book. There were some funny parts in it and I would say that Batuman has a gift for satire. Where I fault the book is that it moves so slowly, one can't enjoy the satire. This reads like a college student's journal, filled with every unimportant detail of her day. There are too many descriptions of things that have nothing to do with the story and don't move it along. The characters were pretty flat and stereotypical but it does add to the satire so it didn't bother me. The story had potential but it didn't go anywhere. It was simply too slow for me to enjoy.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher in order to write an honest review. All opinions are my own.

While I'm not a genius, I am no idiot either; however, I felt stupid, dense and ignorant as I read this book. Perhaps I didn't "get it" but what a long journey to take to get so little out of a story. Had wished and hoped for so much more.....

I got 1/3 through this book and could not go on. At first, I enjoyed the feeling of being a new college student with all the excitement and promise that entails. The author (I assume not far out of college herself) does a great job of capturing that time of life. However, the more I read, the more the book dragged. I'm in my 50s, so part of the problem may be age, but I have read many other books about young adults and enjoyed them, so it's not just that.

The book turned into a chronicle of the narrator's daily movements of the type that would be interesting only to the narrator herself. Kind of like listening to the talk going on in your own head, but in someone else's head....you're interested in your own talk, but this book didn't hold my interest in Selin's internal monologues.

As another reviewer noted, this book is so "interior" that it became claustrophobic. There wasn't much actual dialogue, just the narrator reporting on what was said (telling instead of showing?) I guess this book is meant to be some type of metaphor for learning to become a writer and the ways we use language to connect or isolate. Perhaps it's a commentary on the narcissism of youth. Either way, it just lost my interest.

I think this author has lots of promise, but this book did not live up to the massive hype.

Side note: This book made me extremely irritable at Harvard students who take the education for granted and skip class, while simultaneously jealous of all the amazing classes they get to take.

3 stars for Batuman's excellent writing. Her observations are dead on and she has a knack for calmly describing everyday absurdities and misunderstandings that is truly funny. She is a very talented writer.

The story though...frankly speaking, there is none. Margaret Atwood likened writing to speaking with the dead a la Heroes who journey into the Underworld and come back transformed or with new knowledge. This is her idea of what writing should be like and I think by reading the resulting story, a reader should become similarly transformed or at least be able to understand a situation better for having seen it through the eyes of the author and their story. I think this is where The Idiot falls down: there is very little plot or forward motion and the ending is so noncommittal I almost regretted reading this book; Selin literally states (with some irony, I guess) that she didn't learn a thing. Well, then!

Most of the story is watching Selin get wrongfooted by a guy (Part II) and then, after she gets mad at him but still follows him all the way to Hungary, more subtly wrongfooted by the guy (Part III, and a very little bit of Part IV). It's written in a very self aware way though, since three characters tell Selin exactly what is going on, she just doesn't listen to them.

There are other nit picky parts of this story that bother me, such as Selin's insistence that she is so apart from other people did not feel earned: the story never puts her in the path of people that challenge her (only one, who confounds her, the rest are lovable weirdos), the synopsis mentioning her wanting to be a writer is a bit misleading because that is not at all important to the story, and there is this weird aside about Balzac's critical and commercial success that was so defensive it was weird. Reading this novel was a bit like eating an absolutely exquisite confection that has about 10 grains of sand distributed randomly inside it.

I should mention I haven't read Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (which I guess the title is referring to?) so I might be missing some major points. I can only judge this work as a standalone piece.

The reviews for this book looked promising, so I decided to take a chance on it. This is quite possibly the worst book I've ever attempted to read. Rarely, do I start a book and not finish it, but I couldn't even struggle through half of it. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

"A portrait of the artist as a young woman." This first line from the book's summary is spot on!

The young woman in this instance is Selin, an 18-year-old Turkish-American entering her first year of studies at Harvard. The book starts off with Selin standing in line during first day orientation on campus, waiting to get her new email address, a free dictionary, and an abundance of "printed material" that, as far as she was concerned, really were not worth standing around in long lines for. From there, the book goes on to chronicle pretty much every aspect of Selin's college life – from finding her dorm room and meeting her new roommates (who are polar opposites in every sense of the word) and then agreeing to disagree on how best to "decorate" their new shared quarters, to taking placement tests and signing up for classes in subjects that she (and no one else for that matter) had ever heard of (i.e. Constructed Worlds), taught by eccentric professors who come off as pretentious and self-absorbed, to subsequently meeting and befriending an internationally diverse group of classmates (i.e. Hannah from Korea, Svetlana from Serbia, Ivan from Hungary, twins Kevin and Sandy from China, etc.). This is basically the pattern throughout the entire book. Nothing much happens -- there are no profound revelations, no exciting story arcs, plot points, or anything of that nature. Rather, this book talks a lot about the mundane, day-to-day experiences that Selin encounters and through her own narration, we essentially accompany Selin on her "journey" of self-discovery as she recounts how these experiences help her learn more about herself.

This book was very different from most of the other books I've read with a "coming of age" theme in that the story was told in a subtly sarcastic yet humorous way. I don't like books that try too hard to be funny, so thankfully this one was not like that at all. Selin as the narrator relays her story with a deadpan humor aspect to it that makes some of the things she says and does extremely funny without meaning to be (for example: the whole "controversy" over putting up a poster of Albert Einstein in Selin's dorm room was hilarious). It's been awhile since I've read a book that made me chuckle every couple pages!

What I loved most about the book was actually how much I was able to relate to Selin as a person. Her self-effacing personality, her indecisiveness in wanting to do certain things but ends up going the opposite direction due to overthinking things, her "doing what she is told" approach – reminded me a lot of how I was back during my own teenage years (and made me grateful for how I am now). I also found it interesting that the time period in which the story took place (the mid-1990s) mirrored my own college years as well! The nostalgia I felt with all the memories of my own college days definitely contributed to this book being such an enjoyable read for me.

With all that said though, I do agree with other reviewers that this book might not be for everyone. As much as I was able to relate to Selin, even I got annoyed at times when she would overthink some small thing for the umpteenth time (especially as it pertained to her relationship with her friend Ivan) and sometimes I felt like yelling at her to just "move on." Some parts of the book also went off on philosophical tangents that quite honestly were hard to follow. However, I was able to overlook these flaws (and a few others) due to the overall impact and relatability of the story.

Received advance reader's copy from Penguin Press via First-to-Read program

(Read in January/February 2017)

We get to follow a brilliant and naive 18 year old girl as she experiences her first year of college (1995, but the period-piece aspect becomes secondary as the book proceeds), her new best friendships, and her first love. Selin has the critical faculties of a New York intellectual and the life experience of a child, and this creates a strange, uncanny effect, where we get to see everything we have grown accustomed to with new, clear eyes. Interview questions, email, college professors, travel, love all get the hilarious and unsparing Selin treatment. Here's just a little example from the book that gives you a sense of the intellect, humor and pathos at work in this book:

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo: a Disney movie about a puny, weird-looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, the ones who despised and tormented the weak and the ugly, were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors. Over and over they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to the bullies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”

This is not a plot driven book. If that's what you're looking for steer clear. If, however, you're interested in a beautiful, riveting and surprisingly funny sentimental education of a female artist, a sometimes wending voyage of the intellect rather than the plot, and especially of what it's like to grow up as a brilliant, sensitive woman in a world that is still unkind to women, you won't be disappointed.

When I began this book, it wasn't exactly gripping, but I kept reading. After the first quarter of the book, however, my interest was waning quickly. I couldn't identify with any of the characters. The pace was very slow and I couldn't muster any attention to care what happened. I skim read the remainder of the book and it justified my lack of interest.

Elif is obviously a bright young woman, but just as her character Selin was not ready for love at Harvard, so Elif was not ready for a novel of this proportion. There are funny moments, especially in the first hundred pages or so. That balances out against a sensitively rendered last fifty pages. But much of the middle of the book is flaccid and unnecessary. Many of the Harvard graduates of my acquaintance, not all, operate as if their mere attendance there demonstrates their unchallengeable excellence. One can see the germs of that in Selin’s friends and roommates. They just aren’t that interesting.

What did or would have interested me was poor Selin’s painful, painful issues with growing up. She makes Holden Caulfield look happy go lucky. I felt desperately sorry her. And I could never figure out if Ivan was a total jerk or pretty much as big a mess as she was. Poor motivation on the writer’s part. Good luck to Elif and Selin both. Each has some growing up to do.

During her freshman year at Harvard, the American-born Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is falling in love with an older mathematics student from Hungary, Ivan. Set in 1995, the love story starts via e-mail, a novelty form of communication at the time, but doesn't go beyond the word level, although Selin will decide to spend a couple of weeks in Hungary teaching English in remote villages hoping to be closer to him.
Although not rich in events and actions, this book has a continual flow of observations and intellectual games. This is an example: 'The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet and this was ironic - there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn't yours'.
Selin, an autobiographical character, lives her life through stories and believes there is a sense in language, but doesn't necessarily find any connection with feelings and encounters. Her virtual relationship with Ivan, although completed through meetings in real time is just a projection as she is unable to connect the words to life and real emotions. The entire book is Selin journey through words trying to start her life. The constant monologue is creating an image of an active interior life, the permanent struggle to make order in the daily chaos through words. It is Selin's search for meaning and her formation time. She might look lost and the dialogues can sound sometimes like absurd and non-sensical, but did you ever hear how does your interior life conversations sound like?
It is an intense intellectual novel, with unexpected references and associations, a delightful walk to discovery of the limits of rationality and words, with many comics and humorous episodes.
It took me more than usual to read it because it is a different way of story-telling, but the reading adventure is fully worth the intellectual effort.

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

If Elif Bautman's novel, The Idiot, has a target audience, it would look a while lot like me (minus Harvard). Set in 1995 during a young woman's freshman year of college (the same year I started college), this novel is a trip down memory lane. Easy access to e-mail was new, relationships were dramatically complicated, and a roommate could make or break you.

The Idiot is a book without a typical plot. Instead, we follow Selin, sort of riding along in her head, as she navigates her new world (while feeling like, well, an idiot) at Harvard and over the summer. Bautman perfectly captures that frightening feeling of wonder that accompanies starting college and the struggle to sort out who you are in a new environment.

Some passages had me laughing out loud or cringing, but the "stream of consciousness" style began to wear on me a bit after about 300 pages. I got the feeling there would be no tidy ending because there was nothing tidy about the entire novel. That ended up being true.

While Bautman is a talented writer, ultimately, the nostalgia wasn't enough to keep me engaged in The Idiot. Selin's quirkiness became so odd that it became unbelievable and I was left feeling like I wanted more than the story gave. Though, I have a feeling I'll be thinking about this book for quite some time.

Books about college life are difficult to come by. A college story with a title that draws to mind a Russian classic and which features multicultural characters? Less so. These elements drew me to The Idiot by Elif Batuman.

The Idiot is the type of novel that I appreciated more as a college student when I wanted to be super intellectual and, like the protagonist Selin, was in the process of discovering my identity.

Despite the use of first person narration, the simple, straightforward narration and intellectual tone gives the reader distance from happenings in the novel. It also suggests that Selin is trying to gain distance and thus a larger perspective on her life. This makes sense given that she is a freshman at a prestigious university and in the process of working through new emotions. She is essentially in a foreign world.

I like how The Idiot features a more intellectual take on college life. It captures the college experience for many students: it encompasses none of the extremes, but there’s a sense of falling in a void with no clear way out. Like many students, Selin struggles to find, or create, an exit, and she will eventually come to a conclusion that will make the reader reflect on their own life story up to this point.

What I didn’t like so much is partially the result of my own coming-of-age story. Having gone through the college experience, I used to be in a similar position to Selin. I even went through the confusion of first love there (though a couple years later than Selin). The answers I found were very different, and so the last lines of The Idiot felt like a void had opened, sucking in everything that had just taken place and making me wonder what just happened.

While The Idiot didn’t end up being for me, it was definitely an interesting reading experience. I can see this novel generating good discussion, especially in circles that have more knowledge and appreciation for the nuances in literary styles and literary influences.

Would I read another work by Elif Batuman? I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Batuman is a masterful writer, and I look forward to seeing what she presents to us next!

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

THIS WAS THE MOST BORING BOOK I'VE EVER READ.

It's basically 423 pages of NOTHING HAPPENING. There were points in the story that started to get interesting, and then the author would write something that would make me bored all over again. I disliked almost all of the characters, and hated how the author repeated herself. It felt like someone was writing a college story that had a specific word count, so they added a lot of extra words, or re-organized sentences that have already been written. For example, it would read something like "I pet the dog, then Ivan pet the dog. Then Ivan watched me pet the dog, and give it a treat. Then the dog ate the treat." And so on and so forth. I wanted to claw my eyes out.

This book was pretty painful to read, and definitely could have had about 2/3 of it edited out. For a book about language it doesn't use it very well.

[edit] I remembered my least favorite line in this book. It was:

"I opened my suitcase. All my clothes were there, where I had put them in Paris."

NO KIDDING, SELIN/AUTHOR. WHERE ELSE WOULD HER CLOTHES BE?? SHE NEVER TOOK THEM OUT, AND HAD HER LUGGAGE WITH HER THE WHOLE TIME. WE DID NOT NEED AN EXTRA DESCRIPTION FOR THAT oh my gosh. The whole book is like this!!

Book has no story line, just lots of bla-bla about nothing. I doubt the author has ever been to Harvard or met anyone who studied at Harvard. I started having nightmares every night after reading this book. I’d not recommend this book.

Honestly I didn’t like a thing about it. I felt these Ivy league college freshman had the maturity of 12 year olds. The books narrator spoke like a five year old, with short broken sentences or possibly the cadence of a non-native speaker. Salin was raised in NJ, was a linguistics major, but that didnt come across. I had no ineresst in any of the dull characters nor their dialogue. The story took place in the mid ‘90’s, about the time I graduated university, and ALL of her roomates were vigins, discussing if they would lose their virginity in college? Seriously? They talked about it like prepubescent girls talk. i dont remember ANY virgins, by the time i hit college. I’m sure there were some, but the implication that it was assumed that girls dont have sex before starting college, in the 90’s was pretty unrealistic to me.

It was so boring. Aside from some musical references made (They might be giants, and an uncredited Dead Can Dance lyric) it couldn’t hold my attention.

I won an ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway, so thank you very much! I really liked thefirst half of the book, but the second half was a little more of an effort to read.

The beginning was absolutely wonderful and I enjoyed every page of it. There are no real chapters, only large sections that follow the two semesters of the school year and the months of the summer break. Each section is separated into many smaller parts without titles, very similar to journal entries without dates. These parts are very short at first, which makes it easy to stop if you need to stop and then pick up the book again without losing your place or forgetting what was going on. In the second half of the book, in particular during summer months, the sections become much longer and sometimes I found it necessary to stop in the middle of a section, which made it more difficult to remember what was going on.

The book is written in the first-person narrative from the perspective of the main character, Selin, an American of Turkish descent, during her first year at Harvard. The beginning covers her new experiences as a university student and specifically a Harvard student, with all the hassles of figuring out classes, registration, dorm-living, roommates and classmates, including the hierarchy between lower- and upper-division students. Selin proves to be an acutely observant young lady with a gift for sarcasm. Her descriptions of college life brought a smile to my graduate-trained face more than once.

Unfortunately, as Selin gets more used to college and develops relationships with different people, her discussions concern concrete reality less and less and she dives into many more and more philosophical observations about language and life. Her discussions on language can be quite interesting, both for a professional like myself and for someone who is not. As a Russian, I genuinely appreciated the rare non-negative representation of Russian language and culture in the book. The author is a specialist in the area, and it was interesting to read about learning Russian language from the perspective of a learner as Selin. I especially liked the story that Selin and her classmates read for their Beginning Russian class. The story is translated into English, obviously, but I could see purely Russian sentence structures and expressions. This was one of my absolute favorite parts of the book, even if this classroom story is set in Soviet times, probably around 1950s.

However, Selin's discussions on life in general are less exciting. She develops an email-based relationship with a senior from Hungary, and those conversations can be quite long and pointless. In fact, there is no conversation, just the thoughts of Selin and Ivan on random topics, which is one of the points. And those observations spill more and more into the rest of the text. On the one hand, I understand where the author was coming from. As a college instructor myself, I hear such pseudo-philosophical discussions every time I am at the university cafeteria. It is normal for teenagers to believe that they know everything better than everyone else and that they can find profound meanings and/or meaninglessness that adults just don't see. Selin uses the word "stupid" to describe everything from shoes at a store to what her professors say. Half of what she hears in her classes is "stupid". That is a normal attitude for a teenager. My problem was that the author seemed to be taking this teenage anger and maximalism so seriously.

The second semester of college and the summer are more and more filled with these pseudo-profound existentialist discussions from the main character who, in addition to everything else, experiences unrequited love. Again, it is normal that she would feel the way she does, but reading about it becomes more and more challenging as the book progresses. Selin travels to Paris and Hungary for several weeks during the summer, but life and culture of those places are hardly present in the book. All that the reader ever sees of Hungary during the 100 pages or so is that the standards of living are very low and half of the people are very strange.

Overall, I found it somewhat misleading to see the word "novel" on the cover. There is no particular plot and hardly anything happens. The book reads as a very long diary of a young girl. Of course, diaries have their readers. Unfortunately, I am not one of them, which made the reading experience less enjoyable. I believe that it was an interesting and fresh approach on the part of the author to write about teenage love as something that is neither all cute and cozy nor a tragedy of Shakespearean levels, but rather something quiet, and I appreciate the author's exploration of the inner world of a regular teenager with all its positive and negative emotions, maximalist reactions and beliefs. But I think that the exploration would have been more effective if it were shorter, more condensed. At 430 pages, Selin just starts to sound very annoying and I had to force myself to keep reading for the last 200 pages or so.

I gave the book 3 stars because the general idea is interesting, the character of Selin, while somewhat annoying, is not two-dimensional and has some interesting characteristics, and the beginning of the book was wonderful for me. However, the text did not sustain my interest throughout, Selin did not seem much changed even after her absolutely new experiences in small villages of Hungary, so different from either America or Turkey, and the separate "chapters" become longer and increasingly existentialist in their content. This made the second half of the book a lot less enjoyable for me.

This was like experiencing a year of college. In real time.

Hundreds of pages, all with nothing of real importance to say. However, the awkwardness of miscommunication throughout seemed very realistic. My favorite parts were the sections with Selin and her love interest. Every time they were together it was horribly awkward, yet she pined for him the entire way through. So much of the book was random and sort of stream-of-consciousness style.

The sheer detail in each situation was almost genius in itself. I don't know that I would have the patience to write such exhaustive small talk myself, but the overall storyline was just kind of meh.

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.

Call it what you may—coming of age, picaresque, bildungsroman, boring memoir—this novel soars to new promontories of wisdom and wit. Selin, the protagonist narrator and American born daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a Harvard freshman majoring in some side road of linguistics. She wants to become a writer. Many of her friends at college, most of them also of foreign backgrounds, are bright, eccentric, and distracting. One in particular, Ivan, a senior math major, Hungarian, and woefully self-centered, puts the plot on the ragged edge of a romance that Selin cannot complete. It is largely no fault of either, and somewhat of a byproduct of what was in 1995 a new invention: email. The Idiot is high-end satire concluding on a note of sheer understated brilliance. What seems like commonplace and boring narrative in places is actually cleverly satiric strokes of insight leading into a final revelation that is irony well above and beyond any hotshot Ivy League scale.

Readers who love language, sharp wit and finely written literary fiction are those most likely to enjoy reading Elif Batuman’s novel titled, The Idiot. Protagonist Selin arrives at Harvard in 1995 ready to learn whatever is there to be learned. Batuman finds ways to draw readers into the experience of uncertainty as Selin’s choices lead to other choices and to interesting consequences and experiences. All learning involves some amount of confusion, and the resolution of that comes with knowledge and insight. We join Selin on her journey at Harvard and during a summer in Europe and become caught up in her confusion, love and anxiety and with her tragic fate: becoming a writer. Worse things could have happened.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

This book is not for everyone. It doesn't zoom along the typical lines of a plot. It was a pleasure to read, though the last 50 pages took me 3 days to finish. I feel like the protagonist had an unnecessary handicap with the size 12 shoes and that she would have been perfectly tragic enough without this insurmountable burden.

This book was so difficult to get through due to how tedious the first half of the book was. While I can appreciate a rich inner life, Selin’s weird detachment from the world was so uncomfortable for me to read. Had this book ended with her first year at Harvard I would have given it 1 star, but her experience in Hungary made up for quite a lot. Selin was still weird but the people she met provided enough life that I found myself actually enjoying what I was reading.

I really wanted to like this book but I just couldn’t hang in there. There’s a blurb by Miranda July on the cover and if it had been as smart, funny, and form-breaking as July’s work, I would have loved it. It isn’t. It is self-indulgent and obscure without the charm or humor of July.

I read a wonderful piece by Batuman in the NYer so I know she can write beautifully and has an interesting mind, but this book does not really display those qualities, alas.

I didn't expect the title to be so literal. In fact, I'm pretty sure the narrator suffers from some form of emotional or intellectual impairment, despite being a freshman at Harvard. I'm also pretty sure that my Kindle accidentally skipped 50-100 pages, and it didn't make a bit of difference. The "story" is basically the navel-gazing kvetching of a privileged teen, but there was enough dry humor to keep me going to the end.

I enjoyed reading about Selin's freshman year at Harvard. I love how indirectly this book talked about writing. Everything Selin observes will feed her writing, though she rarely mentions it. This is a quiet, funny, and immersive novel. I really did plow through the first section, but I think that's because I'm obsessed with college and Batuman writes so beautifully about uncertainty, roommates, and figuring out how to communicate using email. The last line of the novel colors what came before with a shade of disappointment. (Not mine, Selin's.)

I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it is long and rambling as some reviewers have commented. But I was so taken with the voice of the character (a geeky, insecure, brilliant college student) that I was sad when it ended (full disclosure, I did skim some sections). The descriptions are so rich and evocative, and at times I laughed out loud.

One of my favorites of the books I’ve read this year. I think the story especially resonated with me because I went to college in the mid-nineties, was equally as sheltered as Selin and had a murky, undefined relationship with a boy.

But I think the best thing about this book is getting to know Selin. By the end of the book, I felt like Selin was not a character in a book, but rather my friend and dorm mate. It’s true many of the things that happen at the beginning of the book feel weirdly mundane, but those are just the kinds of experiences that let you learn a lot about a person. I especially enjoyed learning Selin’s humor—quiet, but still made me giggle out loud.

I was absolutely bored by the amount of inane, unimportant detail in this book. The one bright spot, the relationship between the protagonist and the college classmate she falls for and follows to Europe, is filled with the emotionally immature angst and lack of communication of real life. Unfortunately, toward the middle of the book, the relationship is barely dealt with. With apologies to the author and the Pulitzer voters, I just didn't get it and felt like The Idiot in having given this book the time I did. See what I did there? uh huh

April 7, morning

I am starting this write-up even though I've only reached page 159 of this 423 page novel. I am starting this because I am vacillating between surrender to the love of language and literature radiant in Elif Batuman's prose and the increasingly insistent voice in my head importuning with some irritation, "Quit now! Nothing is ever going to happen in this novel."

So, I thought I would take a break to consider in writing how I'm feeling about this book, and use this deliberation and meditation to make my decision.

I confess, part of my exasperation with this book is its diary-like detailing of the daily, and although Elif Batuman's limning of the quotidian is artful, often insightful, and sometimes amusing, thus far, it is a tale being told by an emotional idiot, full of tessellation and decoration, signifying nothing.

Too, full disclosure, the more of it I read, the more I think: Why can't my blog be turned into a novel? I'm a prolix emotional idiot myself, who can easily spew prettily for 423 pages about nothing. So, this is where I am so far, this far, 159 pages far, into The Idiot.

April 8, morning

Well, here it is almost exactly 24 hours later and I have labored my way through the last 264 pages of The Idiot and I am a bit disgruntled and a lot dissatisfied.

I feel much like I do when I've spent an evening with a much-praised as charming and brilliant friend of a friend who I've found to be a rambling, self-centered, somewhat pretentious bore whose tedious, soporific blethering has left me unmoved.

I found all of the characters tiresome to infuriating, and never cared what happened to any of them. There really is no plot, or, at best, a smidgen's worth which is padded out with faux-literary prosaicism, bloated to a length screaming for prodigious editing.

While some have called the last sentence heartbreaking, I found it to be cruelly mocking; we've spent 423 pages and for what? Perhaps I am the wrong audience for this novel, but all this flood of words --- no matter how artful some of them are --- about nineteen year old Selin and her obsession with the older Ivan, their ludicrous dance around each other, and the mostly obnoxious and all charm-free characters they interact with along the way, was too fragmented, too long, too literarily twee, too MFA-graduate program show-offy, and too over-blurbed and praised.

I wish I'd stopped at page 159. Or, page 50 where I first considered putting it down.

I feel compelled to write a review now because people seem unable to appreciate good literature when they see it. Do you want an easy plot about a girl who grows up and learns to love herself and bla bla bla? Then don't read this. But do read it if you want something different, challenging, and unconventionally funny. It's witty, it's self-deprecating, and it's full of interesting digressions on language, art, and Turkish and Hungarian history. The prose is energetic and lively, and the humor perfectly deadpan, and the world of the novel is fascinating and unique, a look into the advent of email in the late 1990s and what it does to language and communication.

Some of the words and conversations were over my head,but her description of college and other countries was enlightening, and you could feel yourself transported in time to when you first fell in love. She has all the emotional aspects nailed down,without any sappiness.

Too bad this author wasn't one of The Moveable Feast players, as then we would have been spared Hemingway. College academia with a huge dose of emotional chaos...just about exactly how serious college life is all about.

Ms. Batuman is a wonderful writer and this novel's first 100 pages are a subtle and whimsical delight. Unfortunately, the remaining 300 pages are not. This seems to be a common characteristic of much current literary fiction. Not so with Francine Prose or Michael Chabon, whose endings are as good as their beginnings. What exactly are fiction editors doing these days, since helping good writers produce a tight narrative seems to be off the table? My son has a mantra: A book is not as good as people want it to to be. Just so. I kept reading in the hope the book would fulfill its promise. Too bad.

I received a free copy of this book for an honest and unbiased opinion. That being said, the best thing about this book is that it's over...and I can read pretty much anything.

Early on in the book, the main character, Selin, talks about how there are times when her mother hands her books she's read and says "Read this and tell me the point." I wish I had someone I could hand this book to and say that to.

A rambling stream of consciousness, a book of self-discovery, Selin is this 19 year old who has no idea who she is. And I remember being 19 and not having a clue. It's why I wanted to read this book. But I didn't feel like there was any sort of resolution. There were more misadventures and things that made her unhappy and feel displaced in the world. And then...more passive aggressive whining about how she didn't know what she wanted to make her happy.

However, I could not connect to her character. She is like a lone buoy and even though she has friends and relationships, she rarely seems connected to them. There is a lack of vulnerability, unless it is her isolation, and I could not empathize with her relationship with Ivan. They do not even have, what I consider a real conversation where they are mostly on the same page until almost the end of the book. I was never rooting for Ivan because I felt he was largely inconsiderate, aloof, and disrespectful.

I enjoyed Selin’s humor and her perspective on academia and even Hungary, but since I could not relate to her, it was hard to view it with emotions. In a detached way I appreciated these aspects, but nothing about the book drew me in or encouraged me to keep reading. The length kept it feeling like the book was a string of anecdotes or smaller memories connected by a very loose and thin thread that I lost track of constantly.

disclaimer: I received this book in exchange for an honest review from First To Read

As a writer, I don't like to give fellow authors bad reviews, but I finally had to stop reading this sophomoric novel. Given the press it's received, and the many positive reviews here, I had expected something better. But I felt like an idiot for hanging in with the narrative (or lack of one) for as long as I did.

I would probably give this 2.5 stars as I started to enjoy the book when Selin went to Hungary. But over all, this just wasn't my kind of book. I'm not sure if I'm not smart enough or just not deep enough. Either way I found it pretentious, boring, and lame.

It's very rare that I don't finish a book. With "The Idiot," I tried, I really did - I got through 129 pages before I just couldn't do it anymore.

My main problem with the book is that nothing happens. I basically just read 129 pages of a girl's weirdly detached reactions to her utterly absurd life. She has weird roommates, goes to myopically navel-gazing classes with bizarre professors, she meets a strange dude who she exchanges unintelligible emails with, and on and on. So what is the point?

I've read plenty of books that were slow burns, but this is ridiculous.

I loved this book. The sarcastic humor was plentiful. The self-restraint of Selin and Ivan did drive me nuts but I found it more interesting than annoying; it's exactly why these characters lingered with me for a days after I finished the book. I also loved how the book is set in multiple countries, in particular the intense experiences that Selin has in Hungary. I'm going to read it again.

This book isn't for the weak: Elif Batuman is a genius and requires her readers to keep up. The vocabulary and history in this book is incredible and though it's a little before my time (I'm 22), the way she writes about technology in the '90s emitted a universal sense of nostalgia. The romance is cautious and so reminiscent of young love, or like. Her writing is clever and smart and this book is divine.

This book is not for those of us who are many years beyond college. Even the humor is geared toward a younger readers group. Actually, I had to think hard to figure much of the humor. The author looks very young in her picture, so that may be the reason she and I do not communicate. I see promise in her writing. I will come back to her in 10 or 20 years.

Ms. Batuman is a thoughtful, introspective person. What saved this book from pure tediousness was an occasional spectacularly deft description of emotion. It may be worth skimming for those delicious morsels, however rare. I was so keen on reading this book after hearing the gentle author interviewed on the radio, but the tone is one of a hapless victim of everyone and everything. Her life seemed to have plenty of room for joy and even mirth, but not much more than a wan smile or a giggle appears. Most of her inner thoughts and observations, the bulk of the book, are not deep or interesting; many are slightly poignant. Not much else happens. But, her writing is clean and clear. As an adult I bet she will have something to say; And when she does have a story, I hope she writes again.

If your interested in a book that goes into detail about the day to day tedium of a college student then your in luck. I, however, wasn't interested in the most banal details of a college students life.

I had to finish the book because I really wanted to understand the positive reviews, but NOTHING happens to change my initial impression.

The main character is aloof, disinterested in social interactions except with Ivan, and unmotivated...which I guess was mistaken for intelligence? Like she was above it all and viewing things from some higher intellectual ground.

She also begins the novel as meek and uninterested and, you guessed it, she ENDS the novel being meek and uninterested. What a tale!

I have honestly never read something where so little happens. I know there were some themes she was trying to develop around language, meaning, and how they play out in a romantic situation, but lord!, that was totally lost in all the minutiae she went into.

If anyone could tell me what is compelling about this story I would really love to hear it. It was so painful I am genuinely curious why people like it.

I generally don't like to write reviews about books, and especially don't like to trash them, but I am frustrated with this pseudo intellectual crap. She begins the book with a quote from Proust so it must be cerebral...right?

Honestly baffled.

For my money, this book was not so much about the plot, but rather about the subtle wisdom behind each paragraph. Once I took that tact, I found it both enjoyable and thought provoking. And yes, at times, it did make me laugh.

The plot of this book is fairly simple: A college freshman falls in love for the first time. What makes the book phenomenal is the execution. Batuman replicates with stunning accuracy the feeling of being young, uncertain, stubborn, and determined to make a mark on the world. Her narrator is by turns hilarious, philosophical, and vulnerable. Never leaning on types or cliches Batuman crafts characters so vividly and richly realized, that I found myself at several moments thinking "I know someone JUST like that." The Idiot made me laugh out loud, groan, and at several moments, I even considered reaching out to an old college flame. I couldn't put it down. Seriously, buy this book.

Nothing much happens and the jokes are banal and unfunny. Besides, I hate books set in elitist schools like Harvard. Like, who cares? I read a 100 pages and tossed my copy onto the pile of old T-shirts bound for the thrift store. How the hell did this book get nominated for a Pulitzer Prize?

This is one of the most delightful books I've read in years. The world as seen through the eyes of Selin (the main character) is lucid, strange, and disarmingly funny. She's "an anthropologist on Mars", experiencing the semi-adult world with enough awareness of her own displacement to avoid what Keats called "irritable reaching after fact and reason." And as other reviewers have pointed out, it's hilarious. I didn't want it to end.

If you're looking for a plot-driven page-turner, look elsewhere. This is a book of characters, relationships, and thoughts, and as such it's a pleasure from beginning to end.

Purchased at local bookstore. This is an enjoyable and light read, it is hilarious, even laugh out loud funny in several parts. Some parts (on language discussion) may be tedious to read but that does not take away from the overall enjoyment of this book.

This is one of the most delightful books I've read in years. The world as seen through the eyes of Selin (the main character) is lucid, strange, and disarmingly funny. She's "an anthropologist on Mars", experiencing the semi-adult world with enough awareness of her own displacement to avoid what Keats called "irritable reaching after fact and reason." And as other reviewers have pointed out, it's hilarious. I didn't want it to end.

If you're looking for a plot-driven page-turner, look elsewhere. This is a book of characters, relationships, and thoughts, and as such it's a pleasure from beginning to end.

Purchased at local bookstore. This is an enjoyable and light read, it is hilarious, even laugh out loud funny in several parts. Some parts (on language discussion) may be tedious to read but that does not take away from the overall enjoyment of this book.

This book was so unique, I can understand those who didn't love it, but I didn't want it to end. The narrator is sincere, insightful, both baffled and unfazed. I was laughing the whole time. The love interest was a little tedious, but the book was great anyway.

The Idiot is a gratifying read. It's funny, but with the sort of humor that tapers off and makes you wonder why this is so funny. The main character is curious and questions life's perfunctory expectations, especially around language. Highly recommend.

I absolutely adored this book. It's this beautiful journey of what it is like to be in your first year of college when there's limitless possibilities and yet everything seems out of reach. Selin's curiosity for language and understanding is a beautiful way to explore that young love.

Waaaaaaayyy too much involvement with the dud guy who never had any love interest in her to begin with. I kept forcing myself to keep reading, hoping something might actually HAPPEN (in any department), but no go. A tedious read about a self-absorbed nerdy girl.

There was no plot! It just told the story of a girl who follows a man around the world but nothing comes of it. She never really learns anything and the relationship is not resolved at the conclusion.

I loved this book. The sarcastic humor was plentiful. The self-restraint of Selin and Ivan did drive me nuts but I found it more interesting than annoying; it's exactly why these characters lingered with me for a days after I finished the book. I also loved how the book is set in multiple countries, in particular the intense experiences that Selin has in Hungary. I'm going to read it again.

Still tired from staying up late finishing this hysterical book. I loved Selin and Ivan; so often immature but super-smart characters are insufferable. In The Idiot, they're fascinating and unpredictable. Can't wait to read Batuman's next novel.

I am a graduate of Harvard, class of 1972. From reading about the book in reviews, I was interested to see what life was like in 1995 Harvard. It sounded like it could be fun to read about romance at the start of "email." (When I was a freshman at Harvard, The Facebook was literally photos of the Radcliffe girls with their names and hometowns, and we could long for the few physically attractive ones-knowing that realistically, we were not going to get them as our girlfriends, and ignore all the rest.) Anyway, the story was interesting at first as Batuman starts to tell about her Freshman year, but then I could not tell if the author was making fun of what would seem to be pretentious high falutin' thoughts and conversation. I truly thought there was going to be a "reveal" where the great philosophical communications between friends and potential love interests were to be identified as some kind of joke. But no, it all is to be viewed as meaningful by the readers. The whole book is a tedious tale of young unrequited love, that is actually a bit unbelievable for 1972, for 1995, or for 2018. I definitely do not recommend spending time on this book (which I borrowed from the LA Library and did not purchase.) (Maybe female readers will like this more than I did, but I bet my 1972 female Harvard classmates would not give it more than 2 stars either)