Toward halfway, I questioned whether long descriptions of Selin’s Russian class, her conversations with Svetlana, or the thinking behind buying a poster of Albert Einstein, contributed to driving the story forward. It makes for a curious reading experience – the detail was mesmerising in parts, superfluous in others. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.īatuman writes as Selin sees and thinks – with an immense amount of detail. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions.
The story centres around Selin’s relationships with her roommates her confident and extroverted Serbian friend, Svetlana and the person she’s infatuated with, Ivan, a Hungarian maths major. I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing, and it occurred to me for the first time that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had to go through it all sober. It reminded me of preschool, when you had to stand in a circle and clap your hands.
In a black room with orange lights and pounding Spanish music we stood in a big circle dancing.
But despite Selin’s close observance of everything happening around her, university life is a foreign language in itself, and one that baffles Selin. Selin is the daughter of Turkish immigrants, and with the hope of becoming a writer, she takes classes in linguistics and Russian. The Idiot focuses on Selin, in her first year at Harvard (it’s set in the mid-nineties, so expect enjoyable details such as the wonder of email, and the jumpy delivery of music via a Discman). I was reminded of that feeling of absolute foreignness when I read Elif Batuman’s oddball novel, The Idiot. Even things as simple as recognising the name of the train station near to where we were staying – I simply couldn’t find a way of retaining any of it. Yes, you’re probably saying ‘Duh’ but despite attempts, I came away with no more Czech than I started with (i.e. When I was in Prague a couple of years ago, I was struck by how completely foreign the language (and alphabet) was.
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