The Book
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan’s friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin’s summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman’s fiction is unguarded against both life’s affronts and its beauty—and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
About Elif Batuman
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.
About First Readings
First Readings is a shared intellectual endeavor for all beginning Brown students. Now in its thirteenth year, the program provides first-year and transfer students with a common text designed to introduce them to the University and the pleasures and rigors of undergraduate academic life. Students receive the assignment over the summer and prepare a short response paper highlighting something they find particularly compelling, difficult, or unclear in the reading. During Orientation, students meet in small groups for a First Readings Seminar led by a faculty member or administrator. These seminars afford students the chance to meet their peers and begin conversations based upon the shared reading and initial written reactions. The Dean of the College and Brown Alumni Association sponsor the program.
Brown’s First Readings committee—which includes faculty members, undergraduates, and an associate dean—selects the book with the input of the campus community. The committee looks for texts that offer an intellectually rich learning experience that encourages reflection and dialogue for Brown’s diverse incoming class.