The description also tells us that Selin ends up in Hungary, partially due to Ivan, and that she will inevitably learn a lesson about the “mysteries of first love.” It’s a specific description, focusing on the year (1995), and the new phenomenon that was email communication. The description of the novel insinuates that the plot centers around Selin and her email correspondences with Ivan, an older Mathematics student at Harvard. That being said, The Idiot went beyond my expectations. As I age, I find that I give those 5-stars more sparingly than before- literature has to really hit me in a special way now to get such adoration and appreciation from me. This book is the first in about a year to receive a 5-star review from me on my Goodreads account. Selin, the novel’s first-person narrator and protagonist, illustrates her freshman year at Harvard, where she encounters intellectual debate and confusion, social immersion she doesn’t quite believe in, and the wonders and limits of human relationships. Those are the last sentences in Elif Batuman’s masterpiece, The Idiot, a 400-something page novel that wrestles with the abstract concepts of language, learning, multiculturalism, and existentialism within the almost embarrassingly-naive and specific setting of the first year at college. “I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. ThatPetra on Overrated, Disappointing Books Intentionallivingg on The Golden State by Lydia Kies…Īlexandrareads on Her Body and Other Parties by…

Intentionallivingg on Overrated, Disappointing Books PARASITE: Trapped in A Broken Promise (Parasite Movie Review)Įllenore on Adventure Time: You Helped Me….

The idiot elif batuman synopsis