The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Omg, I'm so glad I found this book! It was a recommendation from Anastasia Zavozova, Russian translator of Donna Tartt. She said this book reminds her of Dovlatov's writing, and I agree with this statement: Elif Batuman build her book with some witty quirky anecdotes, but it doesn't seem like a quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness, it's just her way to catch a spirit of the period of life: it's character's first year of university when everything seems new and weird.

You definitely shouldn't expect any solid meaty story from this book, it isn't written to be plot-driven, it reads like a diary with scattered memories about the main character's everyday activities.

Here is a plot: Selin, a naive American girl of Turkish descent, enrolls in Harvard, and here is her first year of study, her first love and her trip to Europe to teach Hungarian kids the English language. That's all.

I think Elif Batuman is very good in catching this very specific period in life when you go to college, and you have a bunch of very different courses, you try to connect them to your everyday life and sometimes fails miserably, and sometimes you overthink everything. And also you are a teenager in a new and different environment: you find new friends, you start to listen/watch/read things because they listen/watch/read these things, you are very awkward, you want to be just like all other normal people and in the same time you want to be quirky, different and very deep. And, of course, you need to write a pretentious text with references to classics. As a person, who was studying literature and linguistics in university, I can say this novel feels painfully familiar. I hate to be called out like this!

Seline's correspondence with Ivan, her crush, is hilarious: they tried to be deep and quirky so passionately that they completely lost all the meaning in their letters (but of course they think their correspondence is super deep and meaningful). And you see how it's funny and at the same time is really important to the Selin, because despite all pretentious writing she honestly in love with Ivan and treasures their correspondence.

There is no solid romantic plot, it's just this state on unsureness when Selin doesn't know what she wants from her life and her relationships with Ivan that stuck in a weird limbo between dating and friendship because they aren't actually dating. This is a mess, but Selin is 18, and Ivan just a bit over 20, so it is an understandable mess.

Another thing you shouldn't expect from this book: well-written side characters. The Idiot purely focused on Selin and her inner struggles, Selin writes about her friends and classmates, but in a way that is more common for a diary not for a novel.

I think, if you want to like this book, you should read it as a (fictional) diary/memoir, not as a novel.

Also, Elif Batuman's writing is extremely beautiful in its simplicity, I have so much pure aesthetic pleasure reading it.

5 out of 5 stars.