Selin is someone who grew up believing in the cores of stories her mother always urges her to find the central meaning in whatever she comes across. The Idiot is an exploration of craft, a subtle, gorgeous, meandering meditation on the very purpose of a novel, of an absolute narrative. The fine beauty of this novel is not in its actions or its chains and links of life-events. None of this ultimately lingers, or even matters, for the reader. She does a few things: reads books, goes to class, tries to write, falls in love, amongst other trivialities. Set in a time where e-mail is novel - that is, both new as well as a vessel for creating narratives, virtual literatures, between people - author Elif Batuman leads us through a largely plotless foray into Selin’s life as a student of Russian and philosophy of language. What follows is a playfully serious romp along the distances between words and meaning, language and communication, narrative and reality, and Selin and the life that happens around her. Within her first few days as a Harvard student, the painfully young, Turkish-American Selin is offered an Ethernet cable - “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?”
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