The idiot

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Elif Batuman: The idiot (2017, Penguin Press)

423 pages

English language

Published Oct. 30, 2017 by Penguin Press.

ISBN:
978-1-59420-561-3
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OCLC Number:
952647422

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Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.

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reviewed The idiot by Elif Batuman

The Idiot

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When nerds collide. Salin Karadağ, a first-generation Turkish-American nineteen year old from New Jersey, starts her first year at Harvard in 1995. She wants to be a writer, and takes courses in linguistics, philosophy of language and Russian, apparently using the same logic that suggests becoming a heart surgeon to learn about love. And Salin wants to learn about love because she meets Ivan Varga in her Russian class. Ivan is a stereotypical math major, and a senior who will be moving cross-country to start graduate work: two strikes against. Salin, like an umpire not paying attention to the game, keeps missing Ivan’s third strikes, and doggedly pursues him. Which is fortunate because, to the extent that The Idiot has a plot, it’s how the relation between Salin and Ivan will turn out.

Otherwise The Idiot is a calendar year in the life of a first-year Harvard student. It might …