Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
"Easily the funniest book I've read this year." --GQ
"Masterly funny debut novel . . Erudite but never pretentious, The
Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman." --Sloane Crosley,
Vanity Fair "Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations
of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and
whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . .
Batuman's writing is funny and deadpan, and Selin's observations
tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship,
social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not
keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will
quietly amuse and provoke thought." -- Huffington Post "Batuman's
brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of
artifice."-- People "Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern
Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is
a sentimental education, it's one leavened by a great deal of
mordant and delightful humor. . . . At once a cutting satire of
academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant
bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, "The Idiot'' is
also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely
appealing young woman."-- Boston Globe "The Idiot is an impressive
debut with a ridiculous amount of charm and a protagonist so
relatable she's almost impossible to forget."-- A.V. Club "The
Idiot is wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the New Yorker and
the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection The
Possessed (2010), has brave and original ideas about what a "novel"
might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is
endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of
language . . . . It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this
process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone who's
successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her
fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her
protagonist's intellectual vertigo with maturity and common
sense."-- Slate
"Beautifully written first novel...Batuman, a staff writer for the
New Yorker, has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to
sketching character...The novel fairly brims with provocative ideas
about language, literature and culture." -- The Associated Press "A
vibrant novel of ideas . . . Like her essays, Batuman's
bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around
chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed
observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh
perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her
deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a
poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for
olives."-- San Francisco Chronicle
"With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay
collection "The Possessed," Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st
century's great love letters to reading . . . It was a tour de
force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary
obsession . . . A different -- though no less tenuous -- variety of
possession is explored in "The Idiot," Batuman's first novel . . .
The book's pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow
smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like
nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it
is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent,
she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely
observed world . . . Selin's is a consciousness one does not want
to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the
presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend.
"I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time," she writes,
"the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning
came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it
seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real
nature had finally been revealed." Batuman articulates those little
moments -- of revelation and of emptiness -- as well as anyone
writing today. The book's legacy seems destined to be one of
observation, not character -- though when the observer is this
gifted, is that really any wonder?"--LA Times "No one writes
funnier or more stylishly about higher education. Nothing written
about grad school is as entertaining as her 2010 collection of
dispatches from Stanford's comparative-literature department, The
Possessed, and her studied satire of Harvard in The Idiot is nearly
its equal."--Village Voice "Batuman's sardonic wit makes for a
delectable unfolding of Selin's experience of love, life and
language."--BBC.com "Batuman's novel is roaringly funny. It is also
intellectually subtle, surprising, and enlightening. It is a book
fueled by deadpan wonder."--New York Review of Books "Charming,
hilarious and wise debut novel . . . Batuman titled the book The
Idiot (after Dostoevsky's famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation
of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor,
silly idiot, she seems to be saying. The Idiot, a novel of
innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude
that Dag Hammarskjöld expressed in his memoir Markings, "For all
that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!""-- Dallas
News "The Idiot is half The Education of Henry Adams and half
Innocents Abroad. Twain would have savored Selin's first
international trip to Paris, Hungary and Turkey...Our first
footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in
Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be
missed."
-- Shelf Awareness "Selin is entrancing--so smart, so clueless, so
funny--and Batuman's exceptional discernment,
comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a
charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a
self."
-- Booklist (starred review)
"Wonderful first novel . . . Batuman updates the grand tour
travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of
ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One
character wonders whether it's possible 'to be sincere without
sounding pretentious, ' and this long-awaited and engrossing novel
delivers a resounding yes."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "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. Readers who are willing to travel with
Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did.
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Not since Don Quixote has a quest for
love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare,
unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to
mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of
being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at
the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection
that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in
torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read
by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years."
--Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir, Lit, and The Liars' Club
"I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in
love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one
wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young
and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane
immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th
Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it
down."
--Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You
"Elif Batuman's novel not only captures the storms and mysteries
and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of
a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it
brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship.
This is a remarkable book."
--Joseph O'Neill, author of The Dog and Netherland "Elif Batuman
surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters.
The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of
her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique
bildungsroman one more fascinated with what's going on around and
outside the bewildered protagonist, than what's going on inside
her."
--Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor
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