The Idiot
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Description
“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ
“Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. 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 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.
At 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. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. 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. 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.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions
Book Information
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Leider habe ich sehr lange gebraucht, um mit dem Buch eins zu werden. Der Schreibstil hat mich nicht gleich abholen können. Doch nach und nach konnte ich mich gut in Selins Leben einfühlen und erinnerte mich an meine eigene Zeit der Ausbildung und Suche nach den eigenen Werten und Zielen. Am Schluss bedauerte ich dann, dass unser „gemeinsamer“ Weg ein Ende gefunden hatte…
Von Sprache, dem Sich-Zurecht-Finden im Erwachsensein, der Banalität des Alltags. Tausende Gedanken, die ich nicht in Worte fassen kann. Ein einzigartiges Buch.
Nach Abschluss von Batumans Roman öffnete ich sofort Google und überflog einige Rezensionen - denn ich wusste und weiß noch immer nicht so recht, was ich von dem Buch halten soll. Fest steht, dass es ein tolles Buch ist und ich es mit viel Freude gelesen habe. Doch darüber hinaus? Darüber hinaus finde ich nicht die Worte. Und von Worten, oder viel eher Sprache, handelt der Roman. Wir werden mitgenommen in das erste Harvard-Jahr der Protagonistin Selin, die eine besondere Affinität zu Sprache hat und sich in Linguistik-Kursen näher damit befassen möchte. Es passiert so viel und irgendwie auch nichts: mit viel Witz und auch Verwunderung, aber auch ein wenig skurril schildert Batuman die banalsten Alltagsgeschehen durch Selins Augen. Selin lebt einfach vor sich hin: studiert, schließt Freundschaften, verliebt sich und immer wieder kreisen ihre Gedanken um die Vielfältigkeit der Sprache. Während des Lesens huschte mehrmals ein Lächeln über meine Lippen. Ein Buch, das ich nicht vorrangig wegen der Handlung, sondern all der kleinen Ereignisse, Beobachtungen und Gedankengänge allerwärmstens empfehlen kann.
DNF at page 130. Be careful, this is more of an incoherent rant than a review. If you're interested in a more consistent one I highly recommend this one by Meike I don't have a problem with unlikeable characters at all. They can be very interesting. Selin, the main character and narrator of The Idiot, is not. She is whiny and passive and pseudo-philosophical. Which would be okay if the novel would make a point of showing that the things she obsesses about are teenage angsty, first-world-problems. Selin is a Havard student, her parents are able to pay for her education. Everyone seems to like her or find her oh so interesting. Oh, yes - and she knows everything better than her Havard (!) professors. I'm not saying you shouldn't question your teachers or scrutinize established theories, but hey, it's your first semester at an Ivy League university...maybe listen to some of it first? Then there is Ivan, the guy she falls in love with for no apparent reason. He is just as pseudo-deep as Selin and writes the most awful emails. He also doesn't talk to her in real life because that would damage the philosophical high-end convos they keep having via email... *insert multiple eyerolling here*. I generally like novels set in academia. I also like a fair share of pretentiousness (if it's handled well). This, however, is so annoying that I simply cannot keep reading. Not even in order to find out if it has any redeeming qualities at all...
3-star review, Jun 28 - Jul 28 2021 <333333 for Selin Ivan’s a dick but somehow i do not hate him, i miss him almost as much as she does for the whole book, from start to finish this was a strange one. the story isn’t told in the way you’d expect, there isn’t the kind of plot that builds on itself and turns into something else (like normal), instead it tells the story like it’s events that happened. things that really happened don’t have tension or reason to them, they just happen, and that’s how this book feels. especially because selin’s way of writing and thinking is very direct, and plain. she says what she’s thinking exactly the same as she thinks it. it creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere, it can be calming or boring or interesting or engrossing, depending on how you read it. (i think this is also largely because of how the diaglogue works in this book - back and forth and back and forth, until the end of the exchange, which then gets summanised). i feel like i would probably have related to this book more if i’d read it in a year or in a few months time, because then i’ll be in the exact position that selin’s in during the story, but i enjoyed it anyway. ——————————————— 4 star review Jul 06 - Aug 02 2022 i stand by what i said in my original review, with only a few thoughts to add (though i was right in predicting i‘d like this book even more in roughly a year‘s time) thoughts i would like to add: selin‘s constantly interested in how the world works, but always in the opposite way to how her instructors are interested in looking at how the world works. rather than trying to understand the mathematical sets ivan‘s explaining, she automatically starts analysing why there’s so much smoke coming out of the house ivan drew to illustrate his point about maths. it’s wonderful how she keeps bringing her own interpretation to things, though this really is a part of the reason why she’s doomed to be a writer (though it’s also why she’s so good at writing and story building) selin missing ivan after spending the day barely talking to him out of nerves — EXTREMELY FAMILIAR FEELING. getting attached to someone you barely know, meeting them and it not going that well, then leaving and missing the version of them you experience via whatever non-face-to-face communication you usually have with the person? it’s so painful and it’s so real i appreciate selin and svetlana‘s friendship a lot more this time around. last time i read this book svetlana felt very random and very harsh, so somehow i never warmed to her, but i like her a lot more now - she’s taken on a life of her own. i recognise some of my own friendships in their dynamic, like during their telephone conversation in hungary, the way it goes from telling each other what they’ve been up to, go gossiping, to analysing the way they think and how it affects their friendship on a really deep and meaningful level
Description
“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ
“Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. 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 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.
At 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. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. 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. 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.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions
Book Information
Posts
Leider habe ich sehr lange gebraucht, um mit dem Buch eins zu werden. Der Schreibstil hat mich nicht gleich abholen können. Doch nach und nach konnte ich mich gut in Selins Leben einfühlen und erinnerte mich an meine eigene Zeit der Ausbildung und Suche nach den eigenen Werten und Zielen. Am Schluss bedauerte ich dann, dass unser „gemeinsamer“ Weg ein Ende gefunden hatte…
Von Sprache, dem Sich-Zurecht-Finden im Erwachsensein, der Banalität des Alltags. Tausende Gedanken, die ich nicht in Worte fassen kann. Ein einzigartiges Buch.
Nach Abschluss von Batumans Roman öffnete ich sofort Google und überflog einige Rezensionen - denn ich wusste und weiß noch immer nicht so recht, was ich von dem Buch halten soll. Fest steht, dass es ein tolles Buch ist und ich es mit viel Freude gelesen habe. Doch darüber hinaus? Darüber hinaus finde ich nicht die Worte. Und von Worten, oder viel eher Sprache, handelt der Roman. Wir werden mitgenommen in das erste Harvard-Jahr der Protagonistin Selin, die eine besondere Affinität zu Sprache hat und sich in Linguistik-Kursen näher damit befassen möchte. Es passiert so viel und irgendwie auch nichts: mit viel Witz und auch Verwunderung, aber auch ein wenig skurril schildert Batuman die banalsten Alltagsgeschehen durch Selins Augen. Selin lebt einfach vor sich hin: studiert, schließt Freundschaften, verliebt sich und immer wieder kreisen ihre Gedanken um die Vielfältigkeit der Sprache. Während des Lesens huschte mehrmals ein Lächeln über meine Lippen. Ein Buch, das ich nicht vorrangig wegen der Handlung, sondern all der kleinen Ereignisse, Beobachtungen und Gedankengänge allerwärmstens empfehlen kann.
DNF at page 130. Be careful, this is more of an incoherent rant than a review. If you're interested in a more consistent one I highly recommend this one by Meike I don't have a problem with unlikeable characters at all. They can be very interesting. Selin, the main character and narrator of The Idiot, is not. She is whiny and passive and pseudo-philosophical. Which would be okay if the novel would make a point of showing that the things she obsesses about are teenage angsty, first-world-problems. Selin is a Havard student, her parents are able to pay for her education. Everyone seems to like her or find her oh so interesting. Oh, yes - and she knows everything better than her Havard (!) professors. I'm not saying you shouldn't question your teachers or scrutinize established theories, but hey, it's your first semester at an Ivy League university...maybe listen to some of it first? Then there is Ivan, the guy she falls in love with for no apparent reason. He is just as pseudo-deep as Selin and writes the most awful emails. He also doesn't talk to her in real life because that would damage the philosophical high-end convos they keep having via email... *insert multiple eyerolling here*. I generally like novels set in academia. I also like a fair share of pretentiousness (if it's handled well). This, however, is so annoying that I simply cannot keep reading. Not even in order to find out if it has any redeeming qualities at all...
3-star review, Jun 28 - Jul 28 2021 <333333 for Selin Ivan’s a dick but somehow i do not hate him, i miss him almost as much as she does for the whole book, from start to finish this was a strange one. the story isn’t told in the way you’d expect, there isn’t the kind of plot that builds on itself and turns into something else (like normal), instead it tells the story like it’s events that happened. things that really happened don’t have tension or reason to them, they just happen, and that’s how this book feels. especially because selin’s way of writing and thinking is very direct, and plain. she says what she’s thinking exactly the same as she thinks it. it creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere, it can be calming or boring or interesting or engrossing, depending on how you read it. (i think this is also largely because of how the diaglogue works in this book - back and forth and back and forth, until the end of the exchange, which then gets summanised). i feel like i would probably have related to this book more if i’d read it in a year or in a few months time, because then i’ll be in the exact position that selin’s in during the story, but i enjoyed it anyway. ——————————————— 4 star review Jul 06 - Aug 02 2022 i stand by what i said in my original review, with only a few thoughts to add (though i was right in predicting i‘d like this book even more in roughly a year‘s time) thoughts i would like to add: selin‘s constantly interested in how the world works, but always in the opposite way to how her instructors are interested in looking at how the world works. rather than trying to understand the mathematical sets ivan‘s explaining, she automatically starts analysing why there’s so much smoke coming out of the house ivan drew to illustrate his point about maths. it’s wonderful how she keeps bringing her own interpretation to things, though this really is a part of the reason why she’s doomed to be a writer (though it’s also why she’s so good at writing and story building) selin missing ivan after spending the day barely talking to him out of nerves — EXTREMELY FAMILIAR FEELING. getting attached to someone you barely know, meeting them and it not going that well, then leaving and missing the version of them you experience via whatever non-face-to-face communication you usually have with the person? it’s so painful and it’s so real i appreciate selin and svetlana‘s friendship a lot more this time around. last time i read this book svetlana felt very random and very harsh, so somehow i never warmed to her, but i like her a lot more now - she’s taken on a life of her own. i recognise some of my own friendships in their dynamic, like during their telephone conversation in hungary, the way it goes from telling each other what they’ve been up to, go gossiping, to analysing the way they think and how it affects their friendship on a really deep and meaningful level