The Idiot
Elif Batuman
Rated: 3.59 of 5 stars
3.59
· 29 ratings · 427 pages · Published: 14 Mar 2017
In between studying psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class. She spends the summer in the Hungarian countryside teaching English to village children, where sad and comic misunderstandings ensue.
Full of the razor-sharp evocations of character and place that have long delighted readers of Batuman’s non-fiction, The Idiot tackles literary ambition, friendship, the American dream, Chomskian linguistics, the Russian novel and romantic love. ‘There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul,’ Proust once wrote, ‘but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.’
Tagged as:
- contemporary 3
- literary fiction 3
- historical fiction 3
- coming of age 3
- college/university 3
- bildungsroman 2
- funny 2
- realistic 2
- friendship 2
- dark academia 2
- protagonists of colour 2
- summer 2
- drama 1
- comedy 1
- 20th century 1
- female mc 1
- psychological 1
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- format - reader age
- young adult 3
- audiobook 3
- book 1