The Idiot
by Elif Batuman · 2017
Buy on AmazonEmbarking 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.
Recommended by
"Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot encapsulates those years of humiliating, but vibrant confusion that come in your late teens. A confusion that’s not even sexual, but existential and practical: Where do people get their opinions from? “How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?” How do I “dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of every day, for the rest of my life[?]” Like those years, The Idiot is boring and strangely intense, depressing and absurd – but mostly charming."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org
"I loved Elif Batuman's 'The Idiot,' and not only because it has very funny math scenes in it."
By the Book: Jordan Ellenberg · nytimes.com