Fabulous Fiction Firsts #631

Mon, 03/13/2017 - 9:56pm by muffy

Borrowing the title from one of Dostoyevsky's famous novel, Elif Batuman's debut novel The Idiot * * * is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale, set in 1995, that "delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience." (Library Journal)

Selin Karada, daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard eager and open to new experiences. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, and is intrigued with email, newly available on campus. In Russian class, Selin is befriended by Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb and, almost by accident, begins exchanging email with Ivan, a senior from Hungary. With each email they exchange, her feelings for Ivan intensifies, even knowing that he has a serious girlfriend.

At the end of the school year, after spending 2 weeks in Paris with Svetlana, Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside to teach English, hoping to meet up with Ivan on weekends, where the unfamiliar language gives rise to a succession of seemingly random but mild misadventures with her various host families.

“Selin is delightful company. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious... Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Elif Batuman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. She is a graduate of Harvard College and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

* * * = 3 starred reviews