The eponymous idiot is 18-year-old Harvard freshman Selin (though with all the Russian influences popping up throughout the story, the title is clearly intended to evoke Dostoyevsky's masterpiece.

I probably read the second half of the book too quickly – I loved it so much, and wish I'd taken more time to savour it – but once I'd started, I just couldn't stop. With the abrupt sadness of The Idiot's final sentence, I felt a near-physical wrench, as if forcibly separated from someone who had swiftly become a good friend. Her writing has been described as 'almost helplessly epigrammatical.' She resides in Twin Peaks, San Francisco. She has also published pieces in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and n+1. In February 2010, she published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which details her experiences as a graduate student. In 2007, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her dissertation, titled, 'The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel,' is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists. While in graduate school, she studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. She graduated from Harvard College and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University, where she taught.īatuman is currently the writer-in-residence at Koç University. Born in New York City to Turkish parents, she grew up in New Jersey. 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.Įlif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. 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.

On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. 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.Īt 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. 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, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. A portrait of the artist as a young woman.

The idiot by elif