The Idiot

Elif Batuman is a contemporary Turkish-American author. She received her BA from Harvard University and PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and spent several years in Turkey as a resident writer at Koç University. Her first novel, The Idiot (2017), as well as her collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), are auto-biographical in nature and focus on life within US academia. Both titles allude to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s eponymous novels from 1869 and 1871, respectively. The Idiot was first drafted in the early 2000s, but was put aside for more than a decade. It is a highly fictionalized autobiographical bildungsroman about unrequited first love and the confusion and uncertainty caused by the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

Currently a staff writer for the New York Times, Batuman has received multiple literary awards, such as the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. The Idiot was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Plot Summary

The novel closely follows one year in the life of a college freshman. The narrator, Selin, is a first-generation Turkish-American woman who grew up in a New Jersey suburb, but has extended family in Turkey who she visits every summer with her mother.