The Idiot

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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Batuman, Elif	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Batuman, Elif	4-week checkout	Due 03-23-2024
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Batuman, Elif	4-week checkout	Due 04-19-2024
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Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Batuman, Elif	4-week checkout	Due 04-17-2024

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Excellent submitted by shannonwait on July 29, 2018, 7:31am This is one of the funniest novels I've read in a long time, but it's also searingly intelligent and a bit melancholy.

Gave me a whole lot of feelings submitted by lexinylander on August 7, 2018, 8:32pm The Idiot was fascinating in that it was yet another book where it felt like I wasn't reading anything about anything at all. I loved Selin a whole lot, mostly because she's so relatable in that she has absolutely no idea what's going on ever and has a lot of opinions about it, and that college and being an adult is really fucking hard. Also having a weird and intense relationship with a pretentious boy who isn't ever straight up with you about his feelings and intensions and makes you feel bad about just about everything is a real big mood, and was more or less Selin's entire motivation behind a lot of the things that happened, at Harvard and abroad. "Because sometimes after I see you, I feel really bad," I said. It's almost physically painful." I touched my sternum."

It was a lot of weirdly interconnecting topics and experiences that weren't related at all until suddenly they were. I actually really liked how the book was divided up into a lot of small chunks that went back and forth between introspection and just straight up banal narration. So many small parts of it made me laugh, and I'm not sure if that was the point or if I just have a weird sense of humor and I loved it even more for it.

Hilarious; really stuck with me submitted by foilista on July 19, 2023, 11:30am Although it was published in 2017, The Idiot was my favorite book that I read in 2022. It is a rare book that made me laugh aloud, but it is also a wryly observed and sharply witty portrait of 1990s college life. Selin, the protagonist, comes bursting off the page. I honestly think that Batuman is one of the smartest writers out there right now.

exactly submitted by savannahwhaley42 on August 10, 2023, 11:29am this is exactly what college was like. i saved so many quotes from this book, I could not love the writing more.