"The Idiot" by Elif Batuman

The Idiot by Elif Batuman is a meandering and slow-paced account of experiences of a freshman student at Harvard in mid-1990s. Even though it is a work of fiction, it is largely autobiographical in nature. The main character Selin is a Turkish-American girl and the entire novel is written from her perspective. In fact, it reads as a series of observations and impressions, which she writes down as she meets her roommates, registers for classes and tries to develop new relationships.

I believe Batuman borrowed the name of the book from Dostoyevksy in order to highlight the inexperience and naiveté of the main character. In particular, Selin struggles in her romantic life. Early on in the semester, she meets a Hungarian student named Ivan in her Russian language class. They then get into an email exchange, which develops into a fascination with the online personas both of them present to each other. Once they decide to meet and talk in person, however, Ivan and Selin are unable to recreate the magic they both felt while writing emails.

Selin also appears to be largely disappointed with her academic life. She feels that her professors are by and large self-absorbed and removed from reality. She reads incessantly and keeps looking for outlets for her intellectual curiosity but ends up bitterly disappointed each time. She feels she is not learning anything. In the summer after her freshman year, following Ivan’s advice, she travels to Hungary to teach English in a village school. However, even there, her experiences are marred by her unrequited love and obsession with Ivan. She admits that her objective in traveling to Hungary was to learn more about him.

Overall, The Idiot is a pretty realistic depiction of how confusing, disappointing and painful growing up can be. However, even though Selin feels she is not learning anything during this first year of her adult life, she is in fact gaining valuable experiences of living and traveling on her own, making friends, choosing classes and subjects to study and to be more comfortable in her own skin. This is not a book about overcoming insurmountable obstacles, or gaining some ground-breaking perspective. It is quiet, largely dispassionate, and self-absorbed. I believe a lot of college students would probably be able to relate to Selin’s story or at least to some portion of it. I ended really enjoying this book and gave it 5 out of 5 stars.