The book is set in 1995, when email is brand new. The clear bit of narrative Batuman does supply is this: during her first year at Harvard, Selin, who believes she is destined to become a writer, analyzes the impact of language on who we are through Russian classes, art lectures, teaching English, visiting foreign countries, and corresponding with Ivan, a mathematics student from Hungary whom she falls deeply for. Still, I found myself incredibly drawn to what I believe is a one-of-a-kind book. No singular storyline consumes the plot, very few characters remain present throughout the entirety of the book (though new ones seem to be introduced every few paragraphs), and the majority of the topics in the long compilation of observations that make up the novel are discussed for no more than a page and are rarely brought up again. The novel, published in 2017 and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, is difficult to summarize. This is a perspective of which I have never witnessed an author dig so deeply into, yet one I now believe more authors should explore when broaching the subject of how to analyze our own identities. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Idiot, Elif Batuman uses the voice of Selin, a Harvard freshman and daughter of Turkish immigrants, to observe the world at its most mundane.
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