'The Idiot' By Elif Batuman Review: Searching Oneself

Elif Batuman published her debut novel "The Idiot" on March 13, 2017. The story is about a woman who needs to find herself as desperately as she's trying to understand others.

According to The New York Times, the timeline of "The Idiot" is in 1995 when the internet is still new and Selin, the protagonist of the story, develops a crush on a Hungarian student because she adores his emails. Selin is a first-year college in Harvard whose parents did everything to make her American.

Selin, in search of how the world as it is, she studies Russian and art, teaches ESL and spends much of the book thinking about the evolution and expansion of language. Her friends are a cool-girl Serbian from Connecticut, Ralph, a young man obsessed with Jackie Kennedy and a Hungarian mathematician, Ivan.

Selin acts like her story is in a novel, she doesn't know what's her role but there she knows there is, thinking that if she answers a certain way then Ivan, whom she considers as her love interest, would also act the way she expected. Selin over-analyses all Ivan's actions his responses, word choices and the time he spends between responding to her emails.

According to NPR, "The Idiot" captures the idiot phase of a human being, where a stage of confusion of what do they want sexually and existentially. The novel has a relatable character, the author herself is a daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, the over-analysis of Selin on Ivan's emails is a familiar sight in those who knows about the dating in 2017.

The novel also captures the time all the adults are aware of when your expectations don't seem to match the reality resulting in the confusion of whose fault it is. "The Idiot" is both strangely intense and boring, can also be saying that life is a mundane process that composed of dull conversations and fleeting crushes but it is a crucial ingredient to creating yourself.

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