Women’s Prize 2018: The Idiot

“Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.”

As a university student, I am probably the perfect audience for The Idiot. And, had I read this book in my first year, I probably would’ve absolutely loved it and tried to get all my friends to read it. As we stand, I did enjoy it a lot, and it is probably a contender for my favourite of the three Women’s Prize nominees I have read.

The Idiot follows protagonist Selin through the course of her freshman year at Harvard. We accompany her through all variety of normal university activities: meeting her roommates, making friends, hanging out with them, going to classes, and visiting her family in Turkey. The book culminates with her return to Harvard for the next academic year, when she proclaims she “hadn’t learned anything at all.”

For me, Selin is relatable as a narrator. She doesn’t know what to expect from university — or indeed life — and as such finds herself frequently confused and disappointed, not knowing what she is meant to do or feel. Rather than being miserable, her frank and often naive cynicism is amusing to read. This wit is what manages to engage the reader in her attempts to find some meaning in her experiences, despite Selin’s slight arrogance. She defines herself as a work in progress, being both uncertain and arrogant in equal measure, full of personality yet void of identity at the same time. Selin reflects on her peers and professors, as well as the material she covers in her classes, trying to figure out who she is, and why it is that she can’t understand everyone else, and why they can’t understand her.

“These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.”

Selin is accompanied through her first year by a number of friends, but the best (and also my favourite) was Svetlana. With her straightforward nature, she is provides balance to Selin’s endless musings on language, literature and life. She calls out Selin when she is being overly existential, when she is being selfish, and frankly just seems a bit more with it than Selin.

“I get that you despise convention, but you shouldn’t let it get to the point that you’re incapable of saying, ‘Fine, thanks,’ just because it isn’t an original, brilliant utterance.”

Even though I realise it was the central plot point, I really hated the incessant crush Selin had on Ivan, a Hungarian finalist from her Russian class. They communicated predominantly via long, cryptic emails, and Ivan ends up revealing that he loves the person who writes Selin’s emails, as opposed to Selin herself. Selin is painted as slightly pretentious, so her pursuit of some true authentic feeling of ‘love’ with Ivan over meaningless small talk with others is totally in character, but it was just inane and boring to me. From this, we do get what I saw as the main point of the book: that Selin is so desperate for some authentic truth and understanding of everything that she never allows herself to experience it. She is the ultimate overthinker. Which is probably why I found her relatable and irritating in equal measure.

“The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important”

I enjoyed this book, but while I might’ve loved it once, I think I only liked it. At 420 pages it was pretty long, and not a lot happens. I was engaged the whole time, because of Selin’s dry sense of humour and the interesting cast of friends and family that she experiences. But, by the end I was mainly just frustrated that Selin still felt she hadn’t learned anything from living a whole year of her life. Or maybe she felt she hadn’t learned anything from trying to understand it too deeply. Either way, I left the book feeling a little disappointed.

“Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read”