THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman appealed because of its cast of characters:

Selin, daughter of Turkish immigrants beginning her undergraduate studies at Harvard
Svetlana, a classmate from Serbia and
Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.

The time period, 1995, and setting - both in Boston and across Europe – also grabbed interest as I began reading and reflecting on college experiences, the efforts to find oneself, and to establish adult relationships. However, I soon felt that Selin was a little too self-centered; although clearly very introspective and clever. Here is an example of her mind at work: "I was thinking about the structural equivalencies 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." After a time, Selin's frequent musings did seem less amusing and began to grate, slowing down the story, even though Batuman is an award winning author who provides a thoughtful commentary on culture, language and "adulting."

Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly all gave starred reviews to this semi-autobiographical debut novel and despite its being over 400 pages, I am curious to see if any of our Senior English classes will decide to explore this unique text.

Hardly a literary debutant, Elif Batuman's essays and vibrant (among other things) travelogue "The Possessed" mark her as a writer whose work is worth the wait. And wait we have, but now that this - The Idiot, her debut novel - is out, and one would hope, doing well, the number of us waiting impatiently for her next book is likely to grow. "The Idiot" is a strong addition to the bildungsroman catalogue. in this case, one that lets the ambiguity do its work and the humor to ferment before she lets it loose. A very funny, poignant, and intelligent take on the difficulties of entering "adulthood", and the frustration that invetiably results, upon having arrived and understanding that you haven't learned much, if anything, along the way.

While my attention span could certainly have been lacking, I am usually a fan of literary fiction yet found myself wishing for a little less of the literary and a little more of the fiction; after forcing myself to continue to the halfway mark, I called it quits.

Although there is some very funny and clever writing in this novel I found it hard going and had to give up. With a radical edit there is a great book waiting in here.

This reads like the unpublished first novel of someone who went to an Ivy League school and decided to become a writer. And that is apparently very close to what it is. In a Fresh Air interview, Batuman (a staff writer with the New Yorker) says as much, although it's completely rewritten from an old draft of a first novel. The main character, learning the ropes of late adolescence in her first year at Harvard, falls hard for someone who doesn't fall so hard for her. There is little emotional depth beyond that, so that for all the quality prose, there is little to hold onto, and nothing that would draw me to a reread.

I was excited to start this book and made it about 25% of the way in before getting extremely bored. The setting was awesome, but I wasn't very interested in the characters. I pushed myself about halfway through but I just could not finish it. I really wanted to like it, but I just didn't enjoy it.

Oh, I really, really wanted to like this book. It's idea is clever, it's set-up is clever, but *sigh* it just isn't engaging. Not at all.

This story is set in the 1990s and, in it, we follow Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, through her freshman year at Harvard. She gets roommates, she signs on for random courses and units on her degree because people persuade her to, she stumbles through societal conventions and idiosyncrasies, and - most importantly - she develops a crush. Her first love.

It sounds great, right? A fish out of water set-up. And The Idiot in the title is, of course, Selin. But the title is supposed to be ironic, for through Selin's naivety and straight-bat response to all the situations she finds herself in, it exposes the ludicrousness of so much of our conventions and 'little ways.'

So what goes wrong?

Well, the plotting and execution isn't great - it's all very much 'and this happens, then this happens, then this happens i.e.. 'there's a class, and then Selin goes swimming, and then her swimming costume is wet, and then she goes on a bike'...' And that rhythm doesn't break or change. It's too monotonous.

Add to that, nothing actually happens. There are no real dramas. Nothing here is at stake or jeopardised. It's all meandering. Selin lacks focus or drive, hence the story lacks focus and drive. Even the love interest sub-plot doesn't really change anything up.

And more than this, Selin remains elusive to us. She never materialises as a fully fleshed out character with contradictions and complexities. She is constructed so flatly - deliberately, i think, to fulfil her purpose as an expose on all our oddities But it does mean we don't ever really care about her.

Such a shame.

1995, Selin, daughter of Turkish immigrants, has just finished high school and can leave New Jersey behind to study in Harvard. She is unsure of what to study, where to begin to understand the miracles of life and the world. It is literature and linguistics that capture her attention first. She studies Russian and tries to understand the mechanism of how language works. She makes friends with Svetlana, a Serbian classmate, and Ivan from Hungary with whom she sits in the Russian classes. She falls in love with the charismatic mathematician who quite often shows strange behaviour. But in writing each other emails, they find a way of expressing their feelings. Selin seizes the chance to go to Ivan’s native country in summer with a programme to teach English in remote villages. This is where she really gets an impression of the world, much more than all her courses in Harvard could ever teach her.

Elif Batuman’s protagonist Selin is a very attention-grabbing character. On the one hand, she is quite intelligent and intellectual, on the other, she is completely incompetent when it comes to dealing with people and analysing her feelings. This makes it difficult for her to understand the relationships she has. At the beginning, she needs the simplistic Russian-for-beginners story about a young woman falling in love to parallel her own feelings, later, when she leaves her English-speaking environment, the misunderstandings due to lack of language knowledge somehow work as a cover for her. She is absolutely ignorant about who is she and who she wants to be. Literature is her way of learning about people.

The novel’s title has been borrowed from Dostoyevsky, yet there are no clear parallels to be found by me. The only one might be in the protagonists’ character, both Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s novel and Selin are open-hearted and innocent-naïve when they enter into contact with the real world. They are somehow unique and do not have an easy start in adult life. Selin is always afraid that she is not intellectual enough for Harvard, she wants to say meaningful things and starts questioning even single words. Thus, she spirals down to appoint where there is no meaning anymore. From the bottom, she has to create meaning for herself anew.

Apart from the two very noteworthy and fascinating characters of Selin and Ivan, what I appreciated most was the style of writing. Batuman plays with the content, the psychology and philosophy of language is paralleled in her writing, it sometimes breaks down to very plain sentences and then they are full of double meanings. The author is especially strong in finding metaphors and comparisons, in particular with nature which brings the theoretical cogitation back down to earth.

It is not a very typical coming-of-age novel, it is much more intellectual and demanding, but nevertheless I also found it entertaining.

Batuman's great gift for comedy, for capturing alienation and for understanding teenage pangs of romantic obsession are all captured in this charming novel. There's much delightful observation and speculation on language as well as an endless fund of deadpan humor. But the 'and then, and then, and then' technique of storytelling drains some of the joy out of the narrative, making its heroine's progress more monotonous than it might be. I'd have enjoyed an ending, too. Nevertheless, this is an author to relish.

I really hate when books with titles like The Idiot make me feel like I’m the person the title is referring to. This book is either really smart or faux smart, and I don’t feel smart enough to figure out which of the two it is (though I’m kind of leaning towards “faux smart” to make myself feel better). Side note: Faux Smart would be an amazing band name. Maybe one word, like Fauxsmart? I expect to be credited in the future debut Fauxsmart album!!!

I get the sense that this was written in the tradition of some classic author I’ve never read. Influenced by some Russian literature, is my guess? And in a way, I feel left out of the joke, like I just didn’t get it. I wondered if this was supposed to be a sort of modern retelling of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but I haven’t read that, and the Wikipedia entry on the novel is about as long as Batuman’s The Idiot*, so I’ll remain in the dark.

*My joke here is that Batuman’s The Idiot is too long. Because it is.

Batuman is genuinely funny, though, and there are some particularly poignant thoughts and ideas to be found in this book. I’m not sure who to recommend this to—Harvard grads? People who like to make fun of academia? People who don’t like to make fun of academia? Linguists? I’m none of these things, and so ultimately The Idiot just isn’t for me. This has a lot of elements that will appeal to other readers (girl falls in love, girl travels the world, girl is confused about who she is and what she does, girl meets interesting people in interesting places, etc.) but none of this really meant anything to me.

[This reminds me a bit of Rebecca Harrington’s Penelope (another Harvard story about awkward teenagers who have difficulty communicating) but Batuman’s The Idiot is the more intellectual of the two.]

I have mixed feelings regarding this novel. I really loved it. And, I also found it very odd. It seemed edgy and artsy. But also lovely and tender. I’m having a more difficult time writing this review, than I have for any other book I’ve read, so I’m going to write this review in more of a list formatting.

What I Liked: 

-I liked the darker, caustic, sarcastic sense of humor
-I enjoyed the various philosophical conversations that Selin had both in her own head, and with others
-I really enjoyed the setting. I love reading books about the college years, because that was such a fun time in my own life, that I love reliving it vicariously through fictional characters
-I loved the comments on the differences between the Turkish language & the English language. This was FASCINATING.

What I Disliked:

-Although I liked the sarcastic writing style, it made it very difficult to enjoy Selin's character. I never felt connected to her, and this was my biggest issue. It made it so difficult to ever feel fully invested in the novel.
-About halfway to three quarters of the way through, I also became annoyed with the other main character, Ivan, making it (again), difficult to be fully invested.

My Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

I got tired of the protagonist and her unrequited love. It was a good read, but would have been more enjoyable if about 50 pages were removed.

I did not finish this book as I did not engage with the story or the characters.

I received an ARC 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.

This book is a deep character study with a lot of set-up. I would recommend for fans of literary fiction in the style of Donna Tartt, but I think this book has narrower appeal and would call to a specific type of reader. It does have quite a few beautiful literary moments and is also humorous in its own quirky way.

This was a disappointment. I struggled to get into it due to the disconnectedness of the writing. Batuman had some good lines and interesting characters, but overall it all felt too disjointed to feel like a rewarding experience.

"Coming of age" novels come in all shape and sizes. From the (unbearable) Catcher in the Rye to the classic "To Kill A Mockingbird", I've read my fair share. "The Idiot" by Elif Batuman is another to add to the list. There's something so familiar about it that I immediately recognized. Selin is eighteen years old and a first year at Harvard. She learns 'how to email' and surveys several classes, finding language the most interesting.

Selin feels he has no option but to be a writer. For a large portion of the book, she observes, her roommates, her shitty friend Svetlana, and boys. She soon begins exchanging emails with her classmate Ivan, an older, Hungarian math student. Here's where the story grows to explore the budding first love and all the complications of loving someone who isn't really a person just yet.

Let's be real, Selin is kind of a weirdo. But, who, as a freshman in college, wasn't a weirdo. It's the first taste of freedom that so many people experience. No real curfew, no schedule (aside from class). This is a story about that weird time, about the new people we all meet and have weird relationships with. A story about that weird first love that doesn't really turn into anything, but who you always remember because you learn about yourself.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this upcoming novel in exchange for this review.

Batuman perfectly captures the dislocation of freshman year as an Ivy League student…the hopefulness of shopping for classes, the disdain of a certain type of Ivy League professor for their students. I loved the description of move-in day into a freshman triple, and the dynamics of assigning one single room and a double… those instant friendships that form, sometimes to your later regret… the assignment of “Meaning” to a short story written to demonstrate verb forms in a language learning book… the descent into exhaustion, and the inability to engage in simple transactions/conversations. Selin falls in love, as much with Ivan as with the idea of Ivan.

I so want to read the story of Selin in her twenties. More, please!

Take one confused girl, born of Turkish immigrants,brought up in New Jersey, place her at Harvard where everyone is examine their navels, and you begin to have an idea what this novel is about. As she develops a relationship with a male Hungarian, we follow her self discovery with her awkwardness and the author's hilarious but deadpan humor. Thorough the novel she examines the minutiae of life, her career goals and her place in the world. However her awkwardness with life's conversation and her lack of awareness of cultural activities made me circumspect of her authenticity. How could she grow up so unaware in America, especially with a forward thinking mother. Thank you to NetGalley for an honest opinion and review of this novel.