I am “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman
Week #5 and #6: reading a book by a female author every week (almost) of 2024
Academically gifted, Selin starts a new chapter of her teenage life at the campus of Harvard College. She is awkward, shy, and frankly, quite boring compared to the other characters in the book. Selin thus becomes a mirror through which we see the world, as the book is literally written as if it were her diary. “The Idiot” is steeped in a mix of wry humor and second-hand embarrassment. The embarrassment that can only be experienced by a young woman in her formative years.
Selin is a student who exists in a world of liminality. Batuman seems to be obsessed with liminal spaces, whether it’s Selin’s transition from high school to college, her transition from her family home to being constantly surrounded by characters, who make her look, frankly, boring, or even her transition from simple phone calls and written letters to emails, which become one of the main plot drivers of the book. She, like the world around her, is caught in this liminal space and she is just lost.
“There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with ‘Dear’ and ‘Sincerely’; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you — all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.”
As Selin goes to her classes, gets rejected by the Harvard orchestra, meets her roommates, nothing happens. Yes, it is a book about a girl who goes to Harvard, travels to France and Hungary but there are no huge plot twists or significant plot points. Frankly, everything in this book has to be read between the lines. The most exciting part of Selin’s life is her one-sided crush on her pen-pal friend Ivan, who is just an… a really bad person.
Selin is a linguistics student, so when Ivan, an intellectually interesting but socially inept upperclassman, starts replying to her emails, seeming to not only not find her extremely weird but actually engage with her in a conversation. What’s more, it is Ivan who is more cryptic in their twisted relationship, which visibly exhilarates Selin, as she tries to decipher his emails.
“One afternoon in the library, I picked up Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to an Atom’ and started to read. There were words I didn’t know, but I didn’t slow down. I just guessed the meaning, or a meaning, and kept going, and I saw then that Ivan was right: it was exciting not to understand. What you did understand was exciting.”
And despite Ivan being a mediocre human being, the voice Batuman created for him is extremely believable for someone who speaks English as a second language (Ivan is Hungarian). The conversations between Selin and Ivan are so dull compared to their writing voices that the moments where they actually talk are starkly different from the rest of the novel.
“This is Selin, who I told you about,” he told her.
“What?” she said.
“Selin,” he repeated, “this is Selin.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
“Oh!” she said.
I briefly held a small, cold, unenthusiastic object.
“I talked to Vogel,” the girl told Ivan, retrieving her hand.
“Oh, really?” said Ivan.
“They’re giving me money, for the Chinese thing.”
“What?”
“For the Chinese thing, they’re giving me twenty-five hundred dollars. But I’m not sure if I should do it.”
“Uh-huh”
“It’s so boring”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t be like that.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t do those things that bore you.”
“But I need the money.”
They talked for a while about the twenty-five hundred dollars and the mysterious, boring Chinese thing that she didn’t want to do.
“Can’t you just take the money?” Ivan was saying.
“What?”
“Can’t you take the money and not do it?”
“Of course not.”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s better than shoveling snow.”
“I know,” she said.”
Adn so on…
Despite that, and the fact that Selin has a male friend Ralph who is much more interesting and is much better for her, she can’t help obsessing over the self-absorbed and off-putting older guy. She even goes out of her way to travel to Hungary to a remote village just to have a chance to see him on the weekends.
The book obviously references “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to which the novel also hints, since Selin is studying the Russian language throughout the book. Selin is, in a way, a modern-day Idiot — a teenage girl thrown into a new and unfamiliar world where everyone seems more confident, more capable, and more adjusted to it than her. Just like “The Idiot,” Selin is unprepared for the “real world,” which causes her to constantly misinterpret others, make mistakes, and be her own worst enemy (this one seems far too familiar).
As the novel slowly progresses, there is little development in Selin’s character. In fact, the novel follows a sort of anti-Bildungsroman structure, as Selin realizes that what she thought she knew about the world turns out to be false. The last 50 pages of the book resonate with a description “nothing happens” even more than the rest of the book. As Selin becomes progressively more depressed about her place in the world and the world itself, the narration becomes filled with less introspection and Selin’s thoughts and gets filled with a Knausgaardian amount of mundane detail. The final lines capture her state very well.
“When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn’t take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.”
Selin is a character that is extremely complex and awfully simple at the same time. She is young and confused about what she should be doing. After all… she’s just a girl!
“I couldn’t imagine how I was going to dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of every day, for the rest of my life … Just being alive felt like some incredibly long card game where you didn’t know if the point was to get cards or lose them, or what you had to do to get cards or lose them.”
However, most of all I enjoyed Batuman’s incredible writing. The humor in the book is so witty and perfectly balanced with the confusion, sadness, and loneliness that Selin experiences, that the novel can get you from laughing to ugly crying in a matter of few pages (or is it just me?).
“I opened the foil lid and looked at the American meal. I couldn’t tell what it was. The man in the seat ahead of me started tossing and turning. His pillow fell into my dessert. The pink whipped foam formed meaningful-looking patterns on the white fabric. I saw a bird — that meant travel.
In “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman has crafted a narrative that is both introspective and outward-looking, a mirror reflecting the universal yet uniquely personal journey of finding one’s place in the world. It took me a bit longer to finish this book, and I had to force myself through it a few times. I finally finished it, and I don’t regret reading it one bit. Next week, I’ll be reading “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, which, as I found out recently, was even made into a movie adaptation.
As always, thank you for reading, and I’ll catch you next time!
