CANR

• The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them ( nonfiction) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2010
• The Idiot ( novel) Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. The idiot https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029596 Batuman, Elif, 1977- author. The idiot / Elif Batuman. New York : Penguin Press, 2017. 423 pages ; 25 cm PS3602.A9237 I35 2017 ISBN: 9781594205613 (hardcover) 2. The possessed : adventures with Russian books and the people who read them https://lccn.loc.gov/2009025416 Batuman, Elif, 1977- The possessed : adventures with Russian books and the people who read them / Elif Batuman. 1st ed. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 296 p. ; 21 cm. PG2986 .B33 2010 ISBN: 9780374532185 (pbk. : alk. paper)

• Wikipedia -

  Elif Batuman
  Born 1977
  Nationality American
  Occupation Writer, novelist, academic
  Elif Batuman (born in 1977) is an American author, academic, and journalist.[1]
  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  3 Bibliography
  3.1 Books
  3.2 Essays, reporting and other contributions
  3.3 Interviews
  4 Awards
  5 References
  6 External links
  Early life[edit]
  Elif Batuman was born in New York City to Turkish parents, and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University.[2] While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel,[3] is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.[1]
  Career[edit]
  In February 2010, Batuman published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material she previously published in The New Yorker,[4] Harper's Magazine,[5] and n+1,[6][7] which details her experiences as a graduate student. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical."[2]
  Batuman was writer-in-residence at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey[8] from 2010 to 2013. Now she lives in New York.[9]
  Bibliography[edit]
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Books[edit]
  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Macmillan. 2010. ISBN 978-0-374-53218-5.
  The Idiot Penguin, 2017. ISBN 978-1-594-20561-3.
  Essays, reporting and other contributions[edit]
  Batuman, Elif (February 2009). "The murder of Leo Tolstoy". Harper's. 318 (1905): 45–53.
  Elif Batuman (23 September 2010). "Get a Real Degree". London Review of Books.
  Elif Batuman (December 31, 2010). "From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature". The New York Times.
  Elif Batuman (21 April 2011). "Elif Batuman: Life after a bestseller". The Guardian.
  Batuman, Elif (December 19–26, 2011). "Dept. of Archaeology: The Sanctuary". The New Yorker. 87 (41): 72–83. Göbekli Tepe
  Two Rivers. Carolyn Drake, self-published, 2013. ISBN 978-0-615-78764-0. Edition of 700 copies. By Carolyn Drake. Accompanied by a separate book with a short essay by Batuman and notes by Drake.
  "The Big Dig". The New Yorker. 31 August 2015.
  "The head scarf, modern Turkey, and me". The New Yorker. 8–15 February 2016.
  — (December 19–26, 2016). "Epictetus". Visionaries. The New Yorker. 92 (42): 84.[10]
  Interviews[edit]
  Elif Batuman in conversation with Full Stop (14 December 2011).
  Awards[edit]
  Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, 2007.[11]
  Whiting Award, 2010.[12]

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/26/elif-batuman-interview-novel-the-idiot

  Elif Batuman interview: ‘I thought racism and sexism were over. I was in for a rude awakening’
  The journalist-author on fictional truth, fake news and setting a coming-of-age novel in the ‘end of history’ mid-1990s

  Paul Laity
  @paullaity
  Friday 26 May 2017 14.00 BST

  In 1995 Elif Batuman started her first year at Harvard; she was in love with fiction and determined to become a writer. The child of immigrants from Turkey, she had a first name that was unfamiliar in New Jersey, where she grew up, and which had to be constantly spelled out and explained. She has said since that its four letters suggest a fitting joke about writerly aspiration: if the initial desire in a novel is to capture all of life, what is actually produced is just another set of words, a file.

  When we meet, Batuman laughingly tells me that “even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: ‘Oh, I’m sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,’ and would say, if she burned some food, or was late arriving: ‘Don’t put this in your novel!’” Such confidence turned out to be justified: Batuman’s The Possessed, a comic foray into the academic world of Russian literature, was a bestselling “bibliomemoir” before such books became fashionable. She is a much admired New Yorker staff writer, who enriches her reporting with dry humour and self-revelation (her therapy, her unhappiness in love). And she has now produced her first novel, The Idiot, centred on Selin, a Turkish-American woman, who, in 1995, begins her first year at Harvard; she is in love with fiction and already determined to become a writer …

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  A coming-of-age story set over 12 months, the novel recounts Selin’s “awkward, embarrassing experiences” as a new undergraduate, and draws heavily on Batuman’s freshman year. “I don’t think I’ll be pulling the veil from anyone’s eyes,” she has written, “when I reveal that I myself had many such experiences aged 18.” Selin is an outsider, as naive as she is intellectually hungry. In many ways, she resembles a Martian perplexed by strange student behaviour – walking around, according to Batuman, as if saying “What is this sex that you speak of?” and “why do I have to drink alcohol?”

  As Batuman did, Selin avoids taking subjects she had studied at high school, and ends up learning Russian and theorising about linguistics (Batuman can read or speak seven languages). Selin is painfully questioning of relationships, and is determined to lead a life “unmarred by laziness, cowardice and conformity”. “I get that you despise convention,” her friend Svetlana chides her, “but you shouldn’t let it get to the point that you’re incapable of saying, ‘Fine, thanks’, just because it isn’t an original, brilliant utterance.”

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  “As a novelist you write about social mores,” Batuman says, “but not everything can be explained. You want to make the familiar strange and memorable again, and an easy shortcut is to make your protagonist young, clueless and innocent.” Just as The Possessed is a book about misunderstandings and mistakes made by an unseasoned but sardonic graduate scholar, so The Idiot (which also borrows its title from a Dostoevsky novel) has fun transporting the reader back to the pain and embarrassment that come with a stage younger still. Selin is trying to work out how to be a writer, and how to live – or as she puts it: “How to dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of the day, for the rest of my life.”

  The Idiot is also a historical novel, set in the days before smartphones and Wikipedia, which offers a commentary on how the world has changed since the mid-1990s. On the day of her arrival at university, Selin is given her first email address: handed an ethernet cable, she asks: “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” Email is still exciting (this is the era before it became a curse): “Always there … was a glowing list of messages,” some so different from a formal letter that they felt “like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you … the story of the intersection of your lives with others.”

  ‘A lot of what I write is very personal.’
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  ‘A lot of what I write is very personal.’ Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
  Selin begins an email relationship with Ivan, a Hungarian maths major who is in her Russian class. She enjoys their odd, pretentious exchanges, and though unsure about meeting him face to face, begins to write herself into a romantic narrative: “I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book.” Given that Batuman specialises in finding humour in the gap between plots and reality – how things are supposed to be, and how they turn out – it’s no spoiler to reveal that Selin and Ivan don’t find lifelong happiness.

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  Batuman was keen to write about “the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot”. The “tension in the book was there in my life, and I imagine is still there in the lives of a lot of young women. There’s almost something degrading about putting all of your being into the search for the love of a man. Yet everything is still set up so that a relationship with a man who treats you right is the measure of happiness.” Such an attitude exists even among feminists, she maintains, giving examples from Tina Fey’s 30 Rock and an onstage conversation between Lena Dunham and Ariel Levy.

  One reader, Batuman has noted, “was angry at me” because she “spent the whole book waiting for” Selin and Ivan to have sex. This, she believes, “is the same voice, articulating from the same power supply, that makes people constantly ask: ‘Do you have a boyfriend? … Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.”

  In the second half of the novel, Selin journeys to Hungary in the belief that, by doing so, she will understand Ivan better, and is disoriented when the love plot doesn’t run its course. Batuman has said that her own episodes of depression have come when she has been unable to see herself in “any kind of story … It’s the same with a breakup … the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you’re left there … just falling through space.”

  Selin, as Batuman sums it up to me, “knows that she’s supposed to be doing something bigger and better”. But she feels she is also falling out of another kind of narrative, that of becoming a writer. In Hungary, she is disconcerted by the long succession of people she meets, who come in and out of her life “like characters in War and Peace”: she finds herself staying in a house where the husband puts a stuffed weasel in her room, and judging a boys’ leg contest (an episode that also appears in The Possessed). Yet she is determined to open herself up to such experiences as part of being a writer; she feels she should always take “the less conservative and more generous” path. (As a reporter for the New Yorker, Batuman similarly makes herself vulnerable.) Selin ends up believing she has learned nothing – yet one of the jokes being told is that the bizarre, inconsequential real-life happenings that inspired Selin’s story have ultimately ended up in at least one book, and possibly two.

  The lack of structure in the second half of The Idiot deliberately mirrors Selin’s lack of control over her own narrative. A decade ago, Batuman wrote a polemic against the crafted, controlled fiction that was coming out of creative writing courses. Literature, she insisted, should encompass “all the irrelevant garbage” of life. “American writers, break out of the jail!” the essay concluded: “Write long novels, pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things.” Though the literary landscape has since changed, it seems unlikely that Batuman will ever write a novel that isn’t also a set of thoughts about what fiction can or should be.

  Other people, like me, want to understand the things that actually happen to them … my life is a mystery as it is
  “Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing,” Selin considers, “and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything.” Batuman felt the same. As an undergraduate she scribbled stories and diaries, and took up a graduate place at Stanford because “they paid you to read novels”. In the middle of her course, aged 23, she took time off to try her hand at fiction, and wrote about her very first year as a student. Fifteen or so years later, she was having difficulty with a novel about her life after The Possessed, and kept being drawn to flashbacks to a more innocent time. “And I sat there thinking: why am I trying to remember college aged 38 like a chump, when I wrote a whole book about this?” She retrieved her early fictional effort from the Cloud and rewrote it to become The Idiot.

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  When her efforts as a 23-year-old fiction writer came to nothing, Batuman returned to graduate study, and enjoyed a “very heady, exciting time” at Stanford, “pure and intellectually supercharged”. The Possessed is about being “caught up” in literature in such a way, “the feeling of being possessed by reading and thinking about books”; in it, the work of such writers as Babel, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky become almost a religion. “Eat, Pray, Love for the PhD set” was one summary, which would make more sense if it captured how funny The Possessed is, in the manner of the best campus novels.

  The book pursues a love of Russian fiction ignited in youth by a violin teacher who wore a black turtleneck and “produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by … calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition”. Batuman’s hapless adventures are offset by deep literary enthusiasm. She relates reading Babel’s Red Cavalry cycle “on a rainy Saturday in February”, while baking a black forest gateau: “As Babel immortalised for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalised for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which ... produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.”

  Batuman originally wanted to write the book as a novel, but was told nobody wanted to read fiction about a depressed graduate student. When her essays were greeted with acclaim, she, almost by accident, became a nonfiction writer, and was taken up by the New Yorker. But from now on she seems set on making her books fictional, not least because “a lot of what I write is very personal” and it seems more civil “to change a few things”. Her writing might be linked to the current trend for “autofiction” (as in the novels of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard), but Batuman is dismissive of the novelty of such a practice: “Really well-intentioned people tell me: “Wow, you’re exploding the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.” And I’m like: didn’t Proust explode that more than a hundred years ago?” She has admiration for writers who simply “invent stuff that didn’t happen … But other people, like me, are interested in understanding the things that actually happen to them … my life is a mystery as it is.” If Proust were to be writing now, she has said, publishers would make his work nonfiction, with “a colon in the title. It’d be In Search of Lost Time: The Rememberer’s Journey.”

  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman – review
  Elif Batuman's comical treatise on reading Russian literature introduces an exciting, if not entirely original, new talent, writes Francis Spufford

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  One of the two novels Batuman is working on is a Selin sequel, which will be similarly autobiographical, and also about books (Breton, Kierkegaard, Huysmans). It will feature more sex than The Idiot, she says, and will reflect further on Selin’s attempt to live an unconventional, aesthetic life, when all the classic literature she reads about seducing and abandoning gives the active role to men. I remind Batuman of a comment she made a few years ago: “I think sex is a really big problem that people don’t acknowledge enough.” She laughs: “Yes, that sounds like me.”

  The second novel, to be called Swan Park, is in part about the secular-religious split in Turkey, where she lived between 2010 and 2013, and the political polarisation of America. “The impetus came directly from my experience of being in Brooklyn last summer, and of watching the Trump campaign gather momentum, and the way the polls were so wrong about Trump and Brexit.” It made her think of political theorist Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “invisible forces” that people feel oppress them. “I used not to think of myself as a political writer,” she says, but she now realises that “the novel can do political writing that no other discourse can”. Fiction still has “the power to change our minds … like it did in the days of Huck Finn”.

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  Batuman contrasts today’s political moment, and the rise of identity politics, with the background to The Idiot – the mid-1990s, post-cold war illusion of “the end of history”. She recalls her own undergraduate days: “I felt that making too much of having a Turkish identity, or feeling it too strongly, was something I should get over. It was the same with feminism. I shouldn’t say ‘woe is me, I’m a girl’, I should just work harder … I thought: racism is over, sexism is over, bigotry is over. I was in for a rude awakening. It’s like a nightmare … Trump is someone who was around when I was that age, we heard about him all the time. When my uncle came to America we took him to see Trump Tower. I’m middle-aged now, and he’s my president? I mean, how is that possible?”

  I suggest that the fake news associated with Trump’s presidency will only strengthen the hand of those who want to draw a simple line between novels and nonfiction. Ever the evangelist for fiction, Batuman responds with the thought that “there’s something about novelistic truth that is actually anathema to fake news. Novels have to hold together as some kind of story you can enter into, and to make sense from all perspectives. It’s that kind of plausibility that makes a novel feel true, as opposed to just the accuracy of each piece of information.” After all, she has reminded us, Tolstoy didn’t think he was “detracting from the truth-telling power” of a book by writing it as a novel.

• New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elif-batuman

  Contributor

  Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at _The New Yorker _since 2010. Her first book, “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have been anthologized in the 2014 “Best American Travel Writing” and the 2010 “Best American Essays” collections. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a _Paris Review _Terry Southern Prize for Humor.
  Batuman holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2010 to 2013, she was writer-in-residence at Koç University, in Istanbul. She lives in New York.

• Fresh Air - http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520346752/idiot-chronicles-first-love-freshman-year-and-the-early-days-of-email

  QUOTED: "something that I wanted to get at in the book more broadly was the feeling that she's someone who it's so important for her to see herself as a character in a story and to see her life as some kind of narrative. And this relationship with this guy over email really lets her have that. And it turns into this story. And she wants to find out what happens next."
  "And then at a certain point, when that story doesn't work anymore or it doesn't go the way that she thinks it's going to go, she's left without a story. Which is like an actual feeling that I had and still have at times. It's just the worst thing in the world for the kind of person who needs to see their life as a story. Just not having that is this feeling of falling out of narrative."
  "That's something that I really wanted to get across. And that it can happen in a—in love relationships especially you can feel like the narrative is something that was there and you had it together. And then the person took it and went away with it. And now they have it. And you're just falling through space."

  'Idiot' Chronicles First Love, Freshman Year And The Early Days Of Email

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  March 16, 20171:15 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  Fresh Air
  The Idiot
  by Elif Batuman
  Hardcover, 423 pages purchase

  New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman's new novel, The Idiot, follows a young woman's first year at Harvard University, and how she finds love through email.

  TERRY GROSS, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Elif Batuman, is an author and staff writer for The New Yorker who has covered subjects ranging from whether she should wear a headscarf in Turkey to what fears and desires the ghosts in "Ghostbusters" represent. Her new novel, "The Idiot," which takes its title from the Dostoyevsky novel, draws on her own experiences in the mid-1990s when she was a freshman in college trying to navigate academia while figuring out her own identity. It's also the time that email started really catching on. The main character, Selin, develops a romantic relationship through email with someone she has difficulty connecting with in person.

  The main character, like Batuman, is the child of Turkish immigrants. Batuman's parents met in med school in Turkey and became professors and researchers in the U.S. "The Idiot" was originally going to be set in 2010 with flashbacks to the mid-'90s. But then Batuman went back and read the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, which was set in the mid-'90s, and decided the flashback part of "The Idiot" should be the main part of the story. So she drew heavily from that unpublished novel.

  Elif Batuman, welcome to FRESH AIR. So this book is adapted from a book you wrote - how many years ago?

  ELIF BATUMAN: Sixteen, 17 years ago.

  GROSS: Whoa, and you were in your...

  BATUMAN: It's been a while.

  GROSS: And you were in your 20s when you wrote that first book. So you reread it and thought, like, yeah, that's really OK? Or you reread it and thought, well...

  BATUMAN: Oh, I reread it and I thought, this is, like, horribly embarrassing and every moment of it is painful and I want to melt into the floor.

  GROSS: OK, that's what (laughter) - that's more of what I would have expected. And in spite of that, you said, and I'm going to work with it and redo it?

  BATUMAN: Yeah, because - it's kind of because I had gotten into such a knot with the book that I was working on that it was kind of like desperate times call for desperate measures. And then it was also like when I really got into the book that I'd written when I was younger, like, a lot of it was very embarrassing. But it's funny, I remembered when I wrote it - so I wrote it when I was about 22, 23, about the time when I was 18, 19. And at that time, I was really kind of embarrassed and ashamed of how dumb I was when I was 18 and 19. And so the book was full of all this stuff like, when we're younger we're so foolish, and then when we get older we realize - like, written from this perspective of great wisdom of a 23-year-old person. Which, of course, sounded ridiculous when I read it in my late 30s.

  So first of all, that manuscript was much easier to improve than what I was working on because there was so much room for improvement and so much just obviously horrible stuff to cut out. And then I found that the stuff that I'd been really embarrassed of at the time when I was in my early 20s, which was the - just the kind of visceral descriptions of awkwardness and not knowing anything and just this feeling of scriptlessness (ph) that one has when one's younger, that was really moving to me. And it was something that I'd forgotten about in the intervening years.

  GROSS: So the book is set when the main character, Selin, is a freshman in college. And she's with a new group of people. She's kind of different from the people around her because she's of Turkish descent. Her parents are immigrants from Turkey, as yours are. And among the new things in her life is email, which she's kind of just discovered. And she, you know, develops this whole email relationship with someone who she falls in love with through email. But email seems like this extraordinary new thing to her. And it is relatively new at the time. I'd like you to read a paragraph from the early pages of the book about what email is to her.

  BATUMAN: (Reading) In so far as I'd had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew and from people you didn't know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with dear and sincerely, others telegraphic, all in lower case with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains.

  And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you. All the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives was constantly being recorded and updated and you could check it at any time.

  GROSS: You know, I never really thought of the significance of that in email, that in the thread you're always seeing what you'd written. It's coming back to you (laughter). Does that make you self-conscious as a writer?

  BATUMAN: I guess now it does. But at that time - so I really did get email for the first time my first year of college. And before that, I was a big letter writer, like, even to passing acquaintances (laughter) who I didn't know that well and hadn't liked that much in person. I would get really excited about writing letters. And it was always this kind of, like, melancholy undertaking because I would put all of this time and effort into the letters and then I would never see them again. And it was this feeling of having written all this stuff and it was gone away and lost forever. So I actually kind of enjoyed and appreciated having this archive of my whole conversation with the person there where I could look at it later.

  GROSS: So in all the time you spent writing this novel, thinking about your first year in college and everything that was new to you then and all of the emotions you were trying to process, what are some of the things that struck you, looking back, about your own naivete and vulnerability then?

  BATUMAN: Well, one of the things that really struck me was how the person in the book is someone who hasn't really understood the nature of conversational formulas yet. It's like she hasn't heard them. So, like, she goes to a job interview and they're like, what do we miss out if we don't hire you, which is, like, a very standard job interview question. But she's never heard it before. And she's like, what a perverse thing to ask. Like, how could I possibly answer that?

  And she's trying to, like, answer everything in the spirit that it's uttered in, which is actually not the spirit it's uttered in because people are saying things because they have to say things. Not everything that everyone says is a 100 percent pure manifestation of something in their soul. In fact, very few of the things that people say are a 100 percent pure manifestation of what's in their soul, which is how Selin really wants it to be and how she aspires to be. So she's tongue-tied a lot of the time.

  GROSS: When you're meeting new people in college, one of the first things you have to do each time you meet somebody is tell them your name, which in your case must have been a real conversation starter (laughter) because you have a Turkish name. It's Elif Batuman. And...

  BATUMAN: Yeah.

  GROSS: ...I don't know that most Americans have ever heard anybody named Elif before, spelled E-L-I-F. So what was usually step number two after saying, yeah, my name's Elif?

  BATUMAN: Well, for a while I thought it was - people would ask me to spell it and then I would say, it's file backwards, which was something I discovered in middle school and was...

  GROSS: OK, I have to stop you right there (laughter).

  BATUMAN: Yeah (laughter).

  GROSS: Last night, in the middle of the night...

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: ...I woke up and I said, wow, Elif's name backwards is life. If you spell Elif's name backwards, it spells life. Wow, I have to ask her about that in the morning. I woke up in the morning and I said, no, it spells file. What were you thinking?

  (LAUGHTER)

  BATUMAN: Oh, there's something very - it's so - like, the life of a writer, you think that you have, like, all of life and what you have is this file that's, like...

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: But - OK, so anyway, so you'd spell it for them. You'd say it's file backwards. And then they'd probably say, what does that mean? Where is it from? Why are you named that?

  BATUMAN: Yeah. And I don't know, in later life I got kind of more down with that and more down to talk about the meaning of the name. It's from the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. So it's like aleph alpha. It's written as a straight line. So Elifs are supposed to be tall or thin or straightforward or, you know, any number of things like that. There was a time in my life when I would get very - not put upon, exactly, but the minute that someone would ask me that, I would feel this kind of, like, bad feeling. Like, oh, now I'm going to have to do some extra work and it's not fair.

  And then that somehow went away in more recent years, I guess, when I got a wider perspective of the world and learned more about the different issues that different people have, and how it's pretty much something for everyone. And this one's not that bad.

  GROSS: So when you told people in college...

  BATUMAN: Yeah.

  GROSS: ...That your parents were from Turkey, did anybody know anything about Turkey then and how does that compare to knowledge or preconceptions about being Turkish now?

  BATUMAN: Oh, that's interesting. Well, with adults then, they had usually gone to Turkey on some kind of a visit, and they would know how to say some - more or less offensive - often how much does it cost? They would be like I know how to speak Turkish how much does it cost? I'd be like that's great. Great job. The thing that really surprised me when I was in college and told people I was Turkish was I didn't have a very robust knowledge of Ottoman history, but a lot of my closest friends were from - as in the book kind of the two main friend characters. One is Hungarian, and the other is Serbian. She's from former Yugoslavia.

  And I did have friends from those countries, and they immediately were full of all kinds of just horrible stories about the Turks about how their ancestors had been impaled by Turks, and the Turks had occupied their countries for hundreds of years. And I'd never heard those things before. And I like - almost a part of me was like if this was true, I would have heard about it before. Like I - like it wasn't like I didn't believe them, but it just - it didn't - and then, you know, of course, I read all those things. And those occupations were true.

  But it did kind of hold back my friendships with people. One person who I write about in my other book "The Possessed" - this is in graduate school - but he was Croatian. And it was this guy who I was actually really in love with, and at some point he was like, you know, I don't think things are going to work because, like, when I was a kid, I had to read a book that had, like, a crescent dripping blood on the cover that said like "The Bloody Crescent Menace," and it was about Turkey. Like, this has been a real obstacle for me to get past.

  And I guess I hadn't really thought about those, like, nationalistic narratives being something that get in people - because I sort of grew up with that because my parents were really - they were kind of done with that. They were from like a generation and a group that was just sort of done with national identity. I think part of the reason I would be a little - feel a little almost put upon when people ask me about my name was because I saw my mother react that way. I remember people saying, you know, oh, what kind of name is that? And she would be like I really don't see how that matters.

  So I did kind of feel like I didn't really see how it mattered. And then it was strange to me to see people my age still carrying around these centuries-old, and as I learned, bitterly all too real national narratives with them.

  GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Elif Batuman. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new novel "The Idiot." We'll be right back after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MOACIR SANTOS' "EXCERPT NO. 1")

  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is writer Elif Batuman. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new novel "The Idiot" which is semi-autobiographical and set in the mid-'90s when the main character is a freshman in college and is kind of naive about a lot of things and very uncomfortable in the world and has this kind of love correspondence through email with somebody who she is - has quite a crush on.

  So you wrote a New Yorker piece about having to decide whether to wear a headscarf when you were in Turkey. And the head scarf in Turkey has a very interesting history because when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk became the head of the New Republic after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-'20s, he secularized Turkey. And actually, I think he made it illegal to wear - for a woman to wear a headscarf in public because he wanted to make it more Western and more secular.

  And now Turkey is much more of an Islamic state. It has an authoritarian ruler and things were becoming more authoritarian when you were living there from 2010 to 2013. But it was not required for a woman to wear a headscarf, nor was it illegal for her to wear a headscarf. My impression is most women were probably wearing headscarves. So how did you initially decide not to wear a headscarf?

  BATUMAN: Well, I was based at that time in Istanbul where it's not the case that most women were wearing headscarves at the university where I was teaching, almost nobody neither the faculty nor the students. It was very divided depending on what neighborhood you went to. You would see either everyone wearing a headscarf or nobody wearing a headscarf. And in the very cosmopolitan center of the city, you would see both groups mixed almost equally or on the subway, you would see both groups mixed almost equally.

  Of course, in that kind of a setting, it wouldn't occur to me to wear a headscarf because I'm not religious. My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and feels very strongly about it. My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf. It would just be very peculiar.

  The time when I thought about wearing a headscarf was when I was reporting a story in Urfa in the - kind of in the southeast of Turkey. It was a - it was an archaeology story about a Neolithic temple that was discovered. So the temple was a little bit outside the city of Urfa, but Urfa is a pilgrimage site for Turkish Muslims. It's a stop on the Hajj, and I think maybe less so now, but at that time, it was quite a conservative city. And a lot of the women were wearing headscarves.

  And the major site in the - in Urfa was this complex - this actually very beautiful complex of gardens and mosques associated with Abraham. And in holy sites in Turkey, women do cover their heads, even secular women. If you don't have a headscarf, they give you one there. So I had one that I would carry in my bag, and so I would put it on when I went to, you know, when I went to those parks to walk around, I would put it on sort of out of respect and because I wasn't 100 percent sure where what parts of the ground you had to wear it and what parts of the grounds you didn't have to wear it.

  And then one day I left it on. I just kind of forgot to take it off, and I left the park. And I, you know - like I took a bus and I walked down the street and just my experience was just completely different. It felt like - I once remember from my childhood there was, like, an Eddie Murphy skit where he's like - he's white, and he gets to like be on the bus and see how the white people act when the last black person leaves. Like, it was just like I saw a whole different part of human nature when I was wearing this. People were so much nicer to me. They, like, held doors for me and like called me sister.

  And I didn't get any dirty looks, and people didn't, like, I don't know - and then it made me think, like, what am I trying to prove by not wearing a headscarf because to me it stands for a certain series of ideas that I don't approve of.

  GROSS: Well, let's hold it right there. What are the series of ideas that the headscarf represent to you?

  BATUMAN: Well, the headscarf is - I mean, it's based on this idea of a woman's modesty. And because men don't have to wear it, I feel like headscarves are something that are sort of used to make men's sexuality women's problem. I've been told by religious Muslims - I know this isn't necessarily a, you know, majority Muslim view, but I've been told more than once, you know, people complain about rape, but actually the people who get raped are women who don't wear headscarves. If you were to wear a headscarf, it wouldn't send the wrong message. Like, I've gotten kind of coded rape threats from like, I don't know, a taxi driver or just, you know, someone who...

  GROSS: In Turkey? This was in Turkey?

  BATUMAN: In Turkey, yeah, in Turkey. And...

  GROSS: Like if I do something inappropriate, it's your fault because you're not wearing a headscarf.

  BATUMAN: Yeah. And that just seems so unfair and - yeah. And just a lot of the culture of separating the genders just seems to be to make men more comfortable. There is like, you know, women will sit somewhere else. Women pray somewhere else. I just - I don't know. And it's so complicated 'cause I know people have such strong feelings about it. And I have such strong feelings about it.

  And I've noticed that whenever I try to read anything about the subject, I'm just kind of like reading from sentence to sentence and dread waiting for them to kind of like disclose their position. And if it's not the one I have, I just feel like someone hit me. Like I feel like this physical pain, like someone's telling me wear this thing and go sit in this box and think about what you've done. And I know that the people on the other side must feel the same way about what the secularists say. You know, they must hear take off your thing and, you know, like those horrible pictures of the women on the beach having their burkinis removed by - I mean, it's obscene.

  So yeah. It's very difficult to talk about and think about. But anyway, so the thought that I had in Urfa was what am I trying to show by going without a headscarf given that the people who see me without the headscarf have a completely different interpretation? Like, they don't know my ideas. They just know, oh, this is a person who is here and doesn't respect the way that we do things enough to, like, put this thing on her head.

  Like it - and then it was funny because actually after I wrote that piece in The New Yorker, my mother read it. And I think of my mother as such a, like, a proud secularist person. And she's a scientist. And her mother studied literature. And I'm just so proud of her and of her mother. And she was like, I can't believe I didn't tell you to just wear a headscarf in Urfa.

  GROSS: (Laughter).

  BATUMAN: And I was like, really? And she was like, of course. It's just - it's a common politeness. It's - they're people from the countryside. When you go there, of course you wear a hat. It's just a nice thing to do. And for her it was this thing about, like, niceness. And it wasn't this, like, anguished political thing that I'd been making it into.

  GROSS: My guest is Elif Batuman. Her new novel is called "The Idiot." We'll talk more after a break. Also, writer Daniel Torday will reflect on what it means when a cemetery is vandalized like the Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, where he lives. And Milo Miles will review a new album he likes a lot from Sxip Shirey. I'm Terry Gross. And this is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF QUADRO NUEVO'S "DIE REISE NACH BATUMI")

  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Elif Batuman, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new novel "The Idiot." It draws on her experiences when she was a college freshman in the mid-'90s. The main character, like Batuman, is the child of Turkish immigrants. Batuman's parents are secular. Her father is an atheist.

  So were you brought up with religion at all?

  BATUMAN: No. I was told that many people are religious, and that it's important to be respectful and polite. And if someone invites you to go to the place where they practice their religion, it's fine to go and be respectful. But that actually, the most important thing is to be a good person. And that a lot of people think that you need God to help you be a good person. Or God is basically something that people invented to help them be good for various reasons because maybe they're going to go to heaven or God is going to like them better or that's just the way that God is. And they were like, that's actually a wonderful thing. It helps people be good. But you don't need it. You can actually just be good without God for its own sake. And that's actually more direct. And in some way - in some way, I don't know if they said that, but I - in some way more courageous to just do it for its own sake. And that was the view of religion that I had growing up.

  GROSS: So did you have friends who invited you to their place of worship? And did you end up going to different places and exposing yourself to that?

  BATUMAN: Oh, I did. Yeah. I remember I had a friend who was from El Salvador, and she had a communion and I went to her first communion. And it was such a exotic experience with all those girls in their white dresses and the whole idea of the communion. And afterwards, they gave us as party favors these little beautiful El Salvadorian crosses with flowers and doves on them. And I took it home and I hung it on - in the kitchen because I thought it looked nice there. And I remember my mother was like, oh, that's pretty. And then my father was like, why do we have an instrument of torture hanging in our kitchen? And then I put it in my room. But nobody told me not to have it in my room or anything.

  GROSS: Did you ever envy people who had religion and ceremony?

  BATUMAN: I didn't when I was a kid. I did a little bit later. I - when I was a kid, it was - the Cold War was winding down and it was the - then it was the end of history. And I don't know, I thought all of these divisions between nations were going to be erased. And I don't know, all of the - all of the messages from the books that they made us read, like "The Sneetches" and "Animal Farm," like, all of that - those - that kind of simple-minded message would finally reach all of the adults and everyone would get along and these divisions wouldn't exist anymore. And then - and I had kind of, like, a rosy view of America and the freedoms that I thought we had.

  And then I grew up and saw not only identity politics, but also all the ways that - I don't know, I grew up thinking that feminism was kind of, like, over. I thought women had gotten equality and it was done. And I thought people who are still talking about feminism were, like - they should just get over it and just go - just be better than men and then you'll succeed. That was what I thought for a really long time. And then when I kind of realized how atomizing and in a lot of ways unhappy life in advanced capitalist neo-liberal America is for people, then I did kind of envy religious - people who had religion and people who had that kind of community.

  Also, actually, when I wrote my first book, "The Possessed," which was about - it was about Russian literature. A friend of mine read that book. And he grew up very Jewish, in an Orthodox Jewish family. And he was like, when I read this book, I knew it was written by someone who was a very religious person. And I was like, that's bonkers. Like, I'm not religious at all. That's the opposite of who I am. But then when I thought about it, really, what I was looking for in those Russian novels really was the kind of thing that people look for in religious books, which is a way to make meaning out of the world, a way to find community, a way to have continuity with history. So I guess in recent years, I've realized that I guess like everyone or like most people, I do have religious instincts. And yeah, I guess they come out in different ways.

  GROSS: So in your novel, the main character, the young woman who's just starting college, gets into this email correspondence with somebody who she develops this major crush on who is a slightly older math graduate student.

  BATUMAN: He's an undergrad, but he's a senior and she's a freshman.

  GROSS: OK, thanks for the correction. And so they know each other. They've been in a class together. But they correspond mostly through email. Did you have a correspondence like that, somebody with whom you really grew close not in a shared space but through email?

  BATUMAN: Yeah. Not exactly like in the book, but yeah, I did have relationships like that, for sure.

  GROSS: And was that intentionally through email? Or was it just that you were living at a distance and therefore it was the only way you could communicate?

  BATUMAN: Oh, no, with people who were at the same college. So I could have literally gone over and knocked on their door. But we were all - I mean, I don't know, like, Harvard freshmen in general, it's not the most socially well-adapted group of people. And then suddenly you're given this way to - and then people who want to be writers or even worse - like, nobody becomes a writer because they love going up to people and talking in a super articulate, spontaneous way. So the idea that you could just reach someone in this private, password-protected way by writing to them but it still had the immediacy of kind of going up to them was just incredibly attractive, I think, not only for me, but for a lot of people. So I imagine that this kind of thing happened to other people, too.

  GROSS: In your novel, there's a professor who explains to the main character that there's a difference between academic writing and creative writing. Did you have a professor who explained that to you? And what was the difference that was described?

  BATUMAN: I can really remember in graduate school - I first started writing for The New Yorker when I was still in graduate school. And then I was writing my dissertation. And I remember one of my professors not liking one of my chapters. He thought it wasn't rigorously argued enough. And he was, like, oh, now I suppose that we're all writing for The New Yorker now or something.

  And then I graduated and I had a job actually teaching something called academic writing at Stanford. It was for students who were doing these interdisciplinary theses. Anyway, so I was doing that, and the title of the class was academic writing. And I told my editor at The New Yorker, and he was like, oh, how interesting. So I suppose you must take their clear, lucid, accessible writing, throw in a bit of jargon and make it completely incomprehensible. So I was, like, really getting it from the - from both sides at that point. Whereas to me...

  GROSS: Yeah.

  BATUMAN: Sorry.

  GROSS: Go ahead.

  BATUMAN: Well, I mean, there was a lot of exasperation about academic writing and how needlessly obscure it was from nonacademic people. And then there was this idea of nonacademic writing as, you know, dumbed down and facile and sort of, like, clickbaity (ph) from academic people. Which I found extremely unpleasant because I - you know, I wanted to write things that people would actually read, which is not the case with a lot of - it's the case with some academic writing, but not a lot of it. But I also wanted to write about - you know, I wanted to write about Russian novels, which was something that people who weren't academic were not doing so much at that time. So I did sort of feel trapped in between those two things.

  GROSS: So in your novel, the main character's having this kind of affair through email with somebody who she has a crush on. And at some point she says to him - she's very angry with him. And she says, I called Ivan the worst thing I could think of. I called him a movie director.

  BATUMAN: (Laughter).

  GROSS: Why would that be the worst thing that she could think of?

  BATUMAN: Well, I guess that was kind of a joke. But it also was true because she was, I mean, it kind of goes along with this whole idea of the aesthetic life. Like, some part of her is like, wait, was everything that you're doing some kind of like a trick, like you're just setting everything up and, I don't know, making everyone stand in a certain place? Like, the reason that she's really mad at him when she writes that is because, oh, well, I don't really want to spoil the plot. Well...

  GROSS: No, but I will say it's probably a question of, like, her thinking that she sees - that he sees her as just a character in his story, as opposed to somebody who...

  BATUMAN: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

  GROSS: ...Has her own story and her own life and, you know, that they're equals, that they both have their own story. And sometimes their stories overlap. She's not...

  BATUMAN: Yeah. That's so true.

  GROSS: ...Just his character, his creation.

  BATUMAN: Yeah. She feels like he's manipulating her and the other people in his life to make some story that's all about him. And she's actually really sensitive to that. And that's something that I wanted to get at in the book more broadly was the feeling that she's someone who it's so important for her to see herself as a character in a story and to see her life as some kind of narrative. And this relationship with this guy over email really lets her have that. And it turns into this story. And she wants to find out what happens next. And then at a certain point, when that story doesn't work anymore or it doesn't go the way that she thinks it's going to go, she's left without a story.

  Which is like an actual feeling that I had and still have at times. It's just the worst thing in the world for the kind of person who needs to see their life as a story. Just not having that is this feeling of falling out of narrative. That's something that I really wanted to get across. And that it can happen in a - in love relationships especially you can feel like the narrative is something that was there and you had it together. And then the person took it and went away with it. And now they have it. And you're just falling through space.

  GROSS: So do you still feel like you're a character in a larger story? Do you still feel like you need a larger narrative to feel alive or to feel like a sense of identity?

  BATUMAN: Alas, I think that's one of the conditions that gets worse rather than better with age. I think I'm more and more dependent on stories. Although as one gets older, one has a little bit more control.

  GROSS: So who are you in the narrative of your life?

  BATUMAN: I guess just the idea of having a narrative in life always makes me think of "Don Quixote," who's someone - so that's like really the first - arguably the first novel ever. And it's about this guy who loves these books about knights so much. And he sees himself as a knight so much. And he's just so determined to see himself that way and to live his life that way that he goes out in the world and tries to do it. And things just don't match up. Like he goes and he's like, I'm going to kill a giant because that's what happens to every single knight in every single story. There's no way I'm not going to meet a giant. It's definitely going to happen. And then he doesn't 'cause there's no giants. And sees a windmill. And then he breaks the windmill, you know. And then maybe the guy who owns the windmill is angry at him.

  Like - it's like an endless machine for material that comes out of the intersection of the story that you have about yourself and the world. So I guess in my own story about myself, not to get too meta, but I do see myself as a sort of Don Quixote-like character who's always bringing these, like, preconceived more or less romantic stories and then observing the comic disjunctures between what actually happens and my idea of it.

  GROSS: Elif Batuman, thank you so much for talking with us.

  BATUMAN: Thank you. It's been such a pleasure.

  GROSS: Elif Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new novel "The Idiot." After we take a short break, writer Daniel Torday will reflect on the recent vandalizing of a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, where he lives. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF VAMPIRE WEEKEND SONG, "M79")

• Elif Batuman Website - http://elifbatuman.com/

  I have been writing (mostly) nonfiction for The New Yorker since 2006 and have been a staff writer since 2010. Also in 2010, I published a bestselling nonfiction book called The Possessed. It was a collection of comic interconnected essays about the pursuit of Russian literature, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Audiobooks are now available for both The Idiot and The Possessed! I narrated them both myself in a tiny room over the course of several days.

  I have a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. That’s one of the hilarious things you can read about in The Possessed. I also wrote about PhDs here, in the kind of essay I don’t write anymore, now that I have grown gentle with age. I have taught at Stanford University and have been the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, as well as a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul, and a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

  I’m on Twitter @BananaKarenina and on Instagram @ebatuman. I live in New York City.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman, read by the author. Random House Audio, unabridged, digitai download, 9.5 hrs., $20 ISBN 978-1-5247-8158-3

In her debut memoir, originally published in 2010 and now available in the audio format, Batuman revisits her seven years as a grad student in Stanford's comp lit program, where she focused on Russian novelists. Chapters on Babel, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other great Russian writers alternate with chapters describing a summer the author spent studying Uzbek in Samarkand. Batuman's narration, like her prose, is charming and self-deprecating, and she deftly navigates the book's many Russian names and words. She's an inexperienced audio narrator, but her naive approach is perfect for the material. In between meditations on life, art, and graduate school, she relates amusing anecdotes about her subjects: listeners may be surprised to learn that Tolstoy was a skilled tennis player or that, during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, Babel may have saved the life of downed American pilot Merian Caldwell Cooper, who went on to direct King Kong in 1933. Batuman's wit and eye for absurdist detail come alive in this long-awaited audio edition. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 89+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491250894&it=r&asid=81813e8314cb3c3ac076c6a272563a59. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250894

The Idiot
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Idiot

Elif Batuman

#23 Hardcover Fiction

The author of 2010's The Possessed, a highly praised essay collection, returns with her debut novel, which follows a Turkish-American Harvard student to France, Hungary, and beyond. Our starred review said that "Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious."

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Idiot." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928042&it=r&asid=89e5de4b249179afa220fc247b70b62f. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928042

QUOTED: "I worked really hard to make the book fun to read, to keep all the frustration on the level of plot. Some parts of the book that are really carefully plotted, and other parts are more episodic and deliberately non-plotted. But in the whole book I worked really hard on the style and the rhythm, on keeping the number of jokes and delightful or surprising observations up there, because for me that's what makes a book not boring, more than the plot."
"I really wanted to give readers the feeling like: 'Okay, I don't know what is going on with this plot, but on a sentence level someone is still looking out for me—I'm not just being drunk-driven around by a crazy person.'"

Elif Batuman on Writer's Block, the Shame of Youth, and The Idiot, Her Great Novel About the Magical Early Age of Email
(Mar. 10, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New York Media
http://www.vulture.com/
Byline: Christian Lorentzen

The narrator, heroine, and titular numbskull of Elif Batuman's first novel The Idiot is Selin Karadag, a six-foot-tall, New Jersey-born daughter of Turkish immigrants who arrives as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1995 and spends a year connecting and failing to connect with a cast of kooks before decamping impetuously for a summer teaching English in Hungarian villages.

The bit about the kooks notwithstanding, that also describes the teenage Batuman. In real life, Batuman graduated from Harvard in 1999 with a degree in Russian literature, earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in comparative literature, made a splash in the lit world with a series of essays in the then-nascent journal n+1, was picked up as a staff writer by The New Yorker, and spent several years as a teacher and foreign correspondent in Istanbul. In 2010, she published The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which collected essays she'd written for n+1, The New Yorker, and Harper's. It was an unlikely best seller: FSG had bought it as a paperback original for an advance of $7,500, a sum that doesn't come with high revenue expectations.

It was also part of a wave of books by young writers - think of Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead, or Eula Biss's On Immunity - that has constituted a new golden age for the American essay. Then Batuman switched to writing fiction - which, she told me on a recent Friday afternoon at her apartment in Bed-Stuy, was what she'd been intending to write, trying to write, in fact writing, all along.

This wasn't news to those of us, like me, who knew Batuman in college but knew her first through her writing for the Harvard Advocate. (I've also worked with Batuman as one of her editors at Harper's and the London Review of Books.) And one thing The Idiot conveys masterfully is the feeling of the awkward age of 18, something it has in common with novels like Philip Larkin's Jill and the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. Another is more unusual, and particular to the mid-1990s: the discovery of email. On the first page of The Idiot Selin gets her first account. Picking up her Ethernet cord, she asks her roommate, "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" Indeed, it was an innocent time, long before the coming of Wi-Fi, social media, and the rest of the digital labyrinth we now think of mostly in terms mundanity, pathology, or profit:

"There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn't know, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with 'Dear' and 'Sincerely'; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people's brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you-all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your live with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time."

What constitutes somebody's real life? What's the difference between fiction and nonfiction? Why is The Idiot and not some other book Batuman's first novel? This is what Batuman and I talked about in her kitchen after a long walk around the neighborhood. Her watch said we took 6,000 steps. At the end of the walk she said that reading the news about the president every day is like having to hear constant updates about your friend's troublesome infant, except the president is causing suffering on a historic scale. We agreed not to talk about him when we turned on the digital recorder.

The Idiot isn't the book you proposed to Penguin when they signed you up as a novelist. What happened to that one?

It's still there! I still want to do it. It's called The Two Lives, after a phrase in Chekhov. It's about a Turkish-American journalist in her 30s, a lot of it is set in Turkey, and it's more difficult book than The Idiot - it's more political, it has a lot more compromises in it. I worked on it for three years. But as I wrote, this weird thing happened. I kept adding flashbacks. I'd get to the next chapter and be like, "Well, if you really want to know where it all started, it was here." And that point just kept receding further into the past.

By 2015, it was overdue, I was really stressed out, I kept reading about publishers making authors return their advances because they took too long to write their books. Still I couldn't stop writing flashbacks. They just went further back. At some point I found myself writing a flashback where the main character was in college. So then I was sitting there at age 38, trying to remember what college was like.

That's when I had the idea of looking up this old novel draft I wrote in 2000, when I took a year off from grad school. A lot of it was about my experiences in college. I hadn't looked at it in a really long time, because I knew it would be super-embarrassing. But I figured I would just take a quick look, just to find some details about college life to copy-paste into The Two Lives.

As I read through the file, I automatically started tinkering with it. It was so absorbing. The writing was really easy to improve, too, because it was so, uh, I guess youthful. It was really embarrassing and painful in certain ways, but I also felt all kinds of stress I'd been having just somehow lifting off me. With The Two Lives, I'd been finding it really hard to think of the narrator as not me, as not my nonfiction narrating voice. But this old manuscript was about someone who clearly wasn't me, because she was 20 years younger than me - she was a kid. So working with that story really felt like fiction.

And then, as I was going through it, this strange thing happened. I started to see resonances with the story I was trying to tell in The Two Lives. Even in this story I'd written 15 years earlier about this very innocent, ignorant person, there were resonances or figurations of the same difficult adult compromises I'd been trying to write about. And I realized then that for whatever reason I had to finish that book first - that it was sort of a prequel.

When you say it was embarrassing are you talking about the experiences recorded or the writing on the page?

Both. The two things are related. At the time of writing, I was 23. I was living what I thought was this really adult life in San Francisco, where my boyfriend worked in a computer lab and I cooked every night. I was writing about what a misfortune it is to be young, from this point of view of great wisdom and distance. When really I was 23 and my prefrontal cortex wasn't done developing. So the writing itself was really embarrassing.

The content, also, was all about awkward, embarrassing experiences. That's what the book is about. Now I don't think I'll be pulling the veil from anyone's eyes when I reveal that I myself had many such experiences at age 18. This was something I was really ashamed of at the time. And I found that, in between the scenes of awkwardness and embarrassment, there was this whole intervening tissue of a more savvy person with a certain critical vocabulary, and an influence of - I'm not sure what, maybe Donald Barthelme. Look, it was practically the '90s - it was 2000, 2001, I'd had one year of comp-lit in grad school, so you can imagine it. It would go into second person like a video game. That was super-embarrassing to reread.

Ugh I've been talking forever. But it's to set up this very subtle irony that I hope you're appreciating. You see, when I was younger, the content was embarrassing to me, so I devised a style that was supposed to mitigate it. As an adult, the thing I found most embarrassing was the very style that I thought would mitigate the embarrassing content! And the only parts I really cared about, now, were the immediate visceral descriptions of what it felt like to be in those situations.

So revision was a matter of letting the stuff that I felt was embarrassing before just be there by itself. I realized when I wrote the first draft I was too anxious to prove, "I'm not actually as stupid as this person is acting in the book." That was wrong and unnecessary. That's why I ended up calling it The Idiot. I realized the embarrassing parts were the most moving to me.

Did the rewriting involve some enhancements of humiliation for Selin?

No, I don't think so. It didn't feel sadistic. It felt compassionate. I actually don't know if I would have been able to go back to Selin in that way if I hadn't started therapy. A lot of her experience that I thought was really humiliating at the time - when I looked back now, it didn't seem shameful. It just seemed like a picture of a really young person who is well-equipped in certain ways and not well-equipped in other ways. I didn't feel shame. I felt compassion. One thing I did change were Selin's interactions with people who are the age that I am now, like her professors.

There's more than one professor whom Selin calls stupid.

Well, she takes everything they say at its face value, which is not how the world works. So yeah, the book is not always super-sympathetic to the older people. I think I toned it down a little bit though.

There are two points in the book where Selin intrudes from the point of view of many years later. There used to be a lot more, "Oh, when we're young we're so foolish and when we're older we realize -" That was one of my editor's comments. She said, "Either make that perspective the frame, or if I were you I would just take it all out."

So, I took it all out. I just left it in those two places. One of them has a joke about Marguerite Duras that I thought was funny. I was just like laughing too much at my own joke to take it out, and my editor was like, "Okay, you can leave that one." And the other is the scene where they're eating the Awesome Blossom at Chili's, and I Googled the Awesome Blossom and saw that it had been named the most unhealthy dish in America and taken off the menu, and I found that both funny and historical, so I mentioned that, too.

How did you hit on the book's form, diaristic sections of less than or just over a page?

Some of it was based on diaries that I kept. Even in the first draft, it was never written in chapters, it was more in irregular chunks. None were less than a page, because I didn't think that was an option for a novel. I mean I didn't want to write a super-formal form-bending novel where one chapter is a haiku and the next chapter is in the form of a phone book. I wanted it to be something you could sink into without having your head exploded. And then I read Renata Adler's Pitch Dark, and Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation, and they had sections that were as short as one sentence, without losing a kind of conversational readability, without seeming ostentatiously formal. That really made an impression on me.

A lot of the revision was cutting, and in some places there would be a whole scene or section I wanted to cut, with just one joke in it that I thought was funny, or one line that I thought was evocative. There was one long section that I thought wasn't really necessary, but it had this one line I liked, about how only one typographer in all of Paris could decipher Balzac's manuscripts. That line somehow really brought me back to the moment, to the moment of being in a lecture class and thinking, "Huh, so is that what knowledge is." So then I thought, "What if I just cut that whole section except for that one line, would that look super-pretentious?" I asked two people, and they both said, "I can see how someone might think it's pretentious, but I don't think it's pretentious." So I left it in.

Do you think some would call Selin pretentious?

Well, that's a theme in the book. Selin and Svetlana have this conversation about it - whether you can be sincere without being pretentious. It's something Selin thinks about a lot. It's like there are two poles: one is being totally lucid but not conveying anything, just stating completely obvious things, and the other is being completely impenetrable. Sometimes you have to risk going one way or the other. Selin decides she would rather risk being impenetrable than being obvious and lame. I do think that's a real tradeoff in writing, and maybe in life. When I sometimes saw Selin go too far in the pretentious direction, I left some of that in there, because that's what happens. You overshoot sometimes - that's part of it.

Then there's a matter of Selin's first acquisition of email which also essentially coincides with the invention and adoption of email on a mass scale for everyone. I was there at the time - we probably got our first email accounts on the same day.

Within hours probably. Yeah, email enabled a whole new kind of pretentiousness. Part of what Selin likes so much about Ivan is that he writes these pretentious things, about clowns and hell and insanity, without even caring that they're pretentious. It's like, that's how committed he is to expressing what he wants to say. That's how it seems to Selin. He writes these long emails, that are really specific and cryptic at the same time, and it's like, all those things were waiting there in him and all she had to do was write to him and he would tell her. That's something I remember being really exciting when email was new. It felt like email made manifest this whole side of everyone that you just never saw before, because there was no email to manifest it.

What was it like moving from nonfiction to fiction?

When I wrote the first draft, I thought I had to fictionalize my own experiences a lot more. In real life, I did teach in a program in a Hungarian village. But for some reason, I thought I couldn't say that in the book. I thought I had to disguise it in some way to protect the village.

At that time, I happened to read a story on the website of an anthropology department of a Hungarian university. The department had set aside the money for a team of grad students to go to Africa, to live in a village and study some kinship structures. But they weren't able to go. They couldn't get visas or something. So instead they made an African village in the Hungarian countryside, and had graduate students try to replicate those kinship structures there. I thought that was amazing.

At that same time, I read Karl May for the first time, and learned about how some European people and Marxists were obsessed with Native Americans. So in the first draft of the novel, I combined those two things. Instead of having Selin go to an English language program, I invented a Hungarian anthropology department that was studying Native American culture by simulating it in the Hungarian countryside, and having American college students coming over to help, which was completely absurd. It was unwritable. That was where I abandoned the first draft.

It's not common for a successful nonfiction writer to switch to writing novels.

From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating. The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it, I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.

There was this conference about Isaac Babel at Stanford that I really wanted to write about. The thing I wanted to write was going to be about Babel's actual writing, about the scholars who were trying to write his biography, about his actual mysterious and tragic life, about how I picked his relatives up from the airport, and also about some other stuff that was going on in my own life. Just then n+1 magazine started, and Keith Gessen, one of the editors, asked if I could write something for them. I described the piece I wanted to write - I was thinking it would be a long short story, or a novella. But Keith said, "Oh, that's an essay - that's what essays do." So I wrote it as an essay, and that was the first thing I published. And you know how it goes when you publish something. If you're lucky, you get asked to write something else, and the thing you get asked to write is some form of the thing that you already wrote, so I got on a nonfiction track.

Once you get involved in journalism, you tend to keep doing it. It's less obvious economically how to be a fiction writer unless you enroll in an MFA program.

I did always try to pitch novels. I pitched The Possessed as a novelistic retelling of Dostoevsky's Demons set in a Stanford-like comp-lit program. And everyone said, "That's an awful idea." And then Lorin Stein who became my editor said, "Well, if you do it as a nonfiction book, then people might read it because they hope to learn about the plots of Russian novels." Like it would be a time-saving device for people who didn't have time to read the novels themselves.

It was a forerunner in the genre that's come to become the bibliomemoir.

Yes, like the Rebecca Mead one about Middlemarch. But you know, I don't actually see any formal reason why you can't have a biblionovel - why you can't learn the plots of Russian novels just as well from another novel as from a nonfiction book. Why can't the novel do the work that people now think is the purview of essays? It seems really arbitrary and historically contingent, because when the novel first appeared, it was this new combination of all different genres, including the essay.

With the Babel piece, I thought at the time, "Oh, if I write about it as fiction, then I have to do what Philip Roth does in The Prague Orgy, I have to make up a fake Babel-like character and invent the brilliant short stories that he wrote. I'm a busy woman. I don't have the time for that, and anyway I want to write about Babel's actual stories - that's the whole point." I thought that if I wanted the real stories to be an object in my text, I had to call it nonfiction. Now that I have a little more freedom, I don't really feel I have to do that, and I don't see why that has to be the rule.

I don't want to say I don't care about the truth, or I don't think the truth is important. There's a million reasons you might want something you write to have a certain truth status. But I can also think of reasons why you might not want to make a particular truth claim. The story might be more important to you than whether or not it happened. That's what I think fiction is. I don't think it's a sworn statement that nothing in the book is real; I think it's a statement that whether it's real or not isn't the point.

The extent to which it's real might be interesting to a reader. As a reader, I'd love to know how much of Babel's Petersburg stories are true and how much he made up. But I don't feel like that curiosity on my part has to be accommodated in the genre, because there are all kinds of reasons why people might not want to say every single thing that did or didn't happen to them.

For instance, it might be boring.

Oh my God, so boring!

There's a kind of built-in frustration in The Idiot that is at once enhancing the tension but runs the risk of perhaps being so frustrating that it becomes possibly boring.

Yeah, definitely.

What was it like dealing with that in the process of composition?

Well, I worked really hard to make the book fun to read, to keep all the frustration on the level of plot. Some parts of the book that are really carefully plotted, and other parts are more episodic and deliberately non-plotted. But in the whole book I worked really hard on the style and the rhythm, on keeping the number of jokes and delightful or surprising observations up there, because for me that's what makes a book not boring, more than the plot. I really wanted to give readers the feeling like, "Okay, I don't know what is going on with this plot, but on a sentence level someone is still looking out for me - I'm not just being drunk-driven around by a crazy person."

There actually is a reason for all the plot-level frustration, because one of the things I really wanted to explore in this book was the feeling of falling outside of narrative. This was something I experienced for the first time in college. The narrative quality of life, my ability to see my life as a story - for whatever reason, this was always something that I really wanted to have - would just sometimes disappear. I've also had episodes of depression in my life, and those things are connected. For me, a lot of depression is just not being able to see any kind of a story that you're in. It's the same with a breakup. One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere.

That's how I think of the Hungary part of The Idiot. Selin gets there in a linear way, following this narrative thread that Ivan offers. But then it doesn't lead where she thinks. It leads to this proliferation of Hungarian people, with their own different thoughts and problems. Some of them want things from her, others offer her things, some of their interactions are funny or moving or unexpected or sad, but none of them really corresponds to any of the stories she's been telling about herself. She can't figure out what the point is, or where she went wrong. But she can't just abdicate, either. She feels kind of an ethical responsibility to listen to what they're saying, to "be a good sport," to do a good job teaching English.

I do think of The Idiot in a way as a self-standing book, about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot. I have started working on a sequel. Some of the things that don't happen in The Idiot are a direct motor for what happens in the next book.

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Christian Lorentzen

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Elif Batuman on Writer's Block, the Shame of Youth, and The Idiot, Her Great Novel About the Magical Early Age of Email." Vulture, 10 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484857524&it=r&asid=7bf7828274f3ebc63f9f9ce2f156e403. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A484857524

Perfect imperfections
Becky Ohlsen
(Mar. 2017): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
THE IDIOT

By Elif Batuman

Penguin Press, $27, 432 pages

ISBN 9781594205613, audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

Human relationships are tricky: They're built on communication, which relies on language. And language, of course, is unreliable. This is the frustrating truth at the heart of The Idiot, Elif Batuman's debut novel.

Batuman, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 (and author of the 2010 essay collection The Possessed), says her novel is semi-autobiographical. Like its heroine, she was born and raised in New Jersey to Turkish immigrant parents. The two also share a fascination with language, which is evident on every page.

The Idiot is part coming-of-age, part love story. It's steeped in travel and in the devastating power of words--or, more precisely, the general inadequacy of words when it comes to truly getting close to other people.

Our narrator, Selin, is about to start her freshman year at Harvard in the mid-'90s. Quiet and awkward, Selin observes her surroundings with an unfiltered blend of wonder and deadpan humor. Her running commentary is a pure delight. She's at once hilarious, self-deprecating and painfully accurate--and free of the conventions of thought that can make the inner life of a college student seem so ordinary. Basically, she's odd in the best way.

Meeting a professor in his office one day when she has a terrible cold, Selin silently ponders the similarities between a book and a box of tissue: "[B]oth consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case," she notes. But one of the two--ironically, given the setting--has zero utility if all you want is to blow your nose. "These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful," she adds. "I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about."

Part of the novel's joy comes from Selin's encounters with others, from her snippy roommate and her intense classmate Svetlana (with whom she travels to Paris) to Ivan, the enigmatic Hungarian she falls for in Russian class and follows to Budapest. Batuman is especially great at illustrating the torment of love.

But nearly all of her characters' efforts to achieve mutual understanding are imperfect--which, for the reader, turns out to be perfect indeed.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ohlsen, Becky. "Perfect imperfections." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701830&it=r&asid=9592b185d1f0cca3b59d0fb9459c76d5. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483701830

QUOTED: "Batuman's exceptional discernment, comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale."

The Idiot
Donna Seaman
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Idiot.

By Elif Batuman.

Mar. 2017. 448p. Penguin, $27 (9781594205613).

Batuman, winner of a Whiting Award and The Paris Reviews Terry Southern Prize for Humor, lifted a title from Dostoevsky for her first book, the superb essay collection, The Possessed (2010). She does it again with her debut novel, a droll, semiautobiographical tale set in 1995 and narrated by a high-strung freshman at Harvard. A tall Turkish American from New Jersey, Selin is at once enthralled and frustrated by language, while finding mundane aspects of life indecipherable. She takes a mishmash of classes; struggles to tutor adults trying to earn their GED; becomes friends with Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb; and obsesses over Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics major. Selin feels dangerously overwhelmed, yet declares, "I wanted to be unconventional and say meaningful things." Ivan is similarly disassociated from the norm, and the two conduct a hilariously cryptic courtship that culminates with Selin spending the summer teaching English in a Hungarian village and enduring a sequence of alarming excursions. Batuman's brainy, polymorphously curious innocent, her "idiot," ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape feelings and experiences, how differently men and women are treated, and how baffling love is. Selin is entrancing--so smart, so clueless, so funny--and Batuman's exceptional discernment, comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of the messy forging of a self.--Donna Seaman

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Idiot." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244745&it=r&asid=fc2eaf969aa5bb200aca30b834bb5443. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244745

QUOTED: "prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious."

The Idiot
264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Idiot

Elif Batuman. Penguin Press, $27 (448p) ISBN 978-1-59420-561-3

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The mysterious relationship between language and the world" is just one of the questions troubling Selin Karadag, the 18-year-old protagonist of Batuman's (The Possessed) wonderful first novel, a bildungsroman Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence. Beginning her first year at Harvard in the fall of 1995, Selin is determined to "be a courageous person, uncowed by other people's dumb opinions"; she already thinks of herself as a writer, although "this conviction was completely independent of having ever written anything." In a Russian class, the Turkish-American Selin is befriended by the worldlier Svetlana, whose Serbian family has endowed her with capital and complexes, and the older Hungarian math major Ivan, who becomes Selin's correspondent in an exciting new medium: email. Their late-night exchanges inspire Selin more than anything else in her life, but they frustrate her, too: Ivan's intentions toward her are vague, perhaps even to himself. Traveling to Paris with Svetlana in the summer of 1996, Selin plans to continue on to Hungary, where she will teach English in a village school, and then to Turkey, where her extended family resides. Thus Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it's possible "to be sincere without sounding pretentious," and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Idiot." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696470&it=r&asid=545751086fc395c552ed624db5111301. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A478696470

QUOTED: "Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative ... but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful."

Batuman, Elif: THE IDIOT
(Dec. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Batuman, Elif THE IDIOT Penguin (Adult Fiction) $27.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-59420-561-3

A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1. It's fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, "Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent." When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman's (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author's thematic concerns and style. Selin's closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin's first romantic entanglement--which begins via electronic mail--is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language--and languages--can and cannot do. This isn't just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: "we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale--albeit without morphemes." Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Batuman, Elif: THE IDIOT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652415&it=r&asid=59a1027bfaf032ea8bc01db0abb2d75c. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652415

QUOTED: "The narrative is highly detailed ... while the voice is lighthearted and wry, with occasional laugh-out-loud zingers."

Batuman, Elif. The Idiot
Reba Leiding
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Batuman, Elif. The Idiot. Penguin Pr. Mar. 2017.448p. ISBN 9781594205613. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781101622513. F

In this semiautobiographical debut novel, New Yorker writer and National Book Critics Circle finalist Batuman delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience. The story is set in the early 1990s, when Selin, a first-generation Turkish American girl from New Jersey, is introduced simultaneously to both email and Harvard. In Russian 101, she makes friends with Svetlana, a worldly Serbian emigre, and falls for handsome Hungarian upperclassman Ivan. Ivan's affection is elusive--he already has a girlfriend--and their relationship consists primarily of a plaintive yet intellectual email correspondence while Ivan travels about exploring graduate schools. To see Ivan over the summer, Selin commits to teaching English in Hungary. The unfamiliar language gives rise to a succession of seemingly random but mild misadventures. Despite its allusive title, this work is more modern fiction than Russian novel. The narrative is highly detailed and determinedly linear (compare Karl Ove Knausgaard or Ben Lerner), while the voice is lighthearted and wry, with occasional laugh-out-loud zingers. VERDICT Most readers will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leiding, Reba. "Batuman, Elif. The Idiot." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371157&it=r&asid=2ffa054768c68f9b65ed4d2e34ace00c. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371157

QUOTED: "It's impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch."
"The whole is embellished with numberless further digressions, and detours, and detours around digressions, all of it comic, poignant, and very entertaining, as long as you relinquish any idea of getting somewhere."

The Russian connection
315.9532 (May 7, 2011): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and Those Who Read Them

by Elif Batuman

Granta, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 296, ISBN 9781847083135

It's impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch. I began it on the train; barely had I started before my involuntary yelps of hilarity were causing alarm amongst my fellow passengers. An elderly man moved to another seat after I came upon Batuman's description of the time she found herself judging an adolescent boys' leg contest in Hungary. Fortunately, perhaps, I arrived at my station before Batuman embarked on an account of an excruciatingly funny literary seminar to rival Lucky Jim .

Loosely based around the seven years she spent writing a thesis at Stanford University, Batuman's chatty, meandering memoir contains pieces on her favourite Russian authors rather in the Janet Malcolm mould, while covering various trips to the former Soviet Union, the idiosyncrasies of academic life, college amours, grant applications, etc. The whole is embellished with numberless further digressions, and detours, and detours around digressions, all of it comic, poignant, and very entertaining, as long as you relinquish any idea of getting somewhere.

Rather late on I discovered that The Possessed is partly made up of previously published magazine pieces, which is one explanation for its looping progress. On the whole, however, this structure is a conscious choice; a reflection of the random, scattered nature of real life, in which, as Batuman puts it, 'events and places follow one another like items on a shopping list ... and one thing is guaranteed; they won't naturally form the shape of a wonderful book.' At the beginning of the book she toys with the idea of taking a creative writing course instead of studying literary criticism. She decides against it, offering a damning critique of the whole creative writing ethos--its insularity from the wider world of literature, its tidiness and over-simplification of life. Above all she dislikes its emphasis on writing as craft, as technique, over the broad, subtle and probably unteachable aims of the great Russian authors she loves. 'What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?'

For 'the search for meaning' is Batuman's admirable goal, not that she would announce it in so clunking a fashion. But how to find it? Through the academic detective work that connects the revolutionary writer Isaac Babel to the producers of King Kong , or investigates the identity of the protagonist of Tolstoy's The Living Corpse ? In the hunt for hidden portents, and esoteric curiosities such as the 'language of birds', a code word in some traditions for total knowledge? In dreams? 'If there was no connection, you'd find one anyway,' a Croatian friend tells her, skewering the conspiracy theorist side to academic research. 'You remind me of a proverb: the snow falls, not in order to cover the hill, but in order that the beast can leave its tracks.'

As a first-generation Turkish immigrant who prefers Russian culture, Batuman wonders if some magical enlightenment awaits her in Uzbekistan, a country that seems on paper to offer a perfect synthesis of these two strands to her nature. Yet a summer in Samarkand, apart from giving her a good deal of wonderful comic material, leads only to the understanding that 'no geographical location, no foreign language, no pre-existing entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were.'

The final chapter is based around Dostoevsky's novel The Demons , and an episode in which René Girard's theory of mimetic desire--yet another pattern to make sense of the muddle of life--seems to escape the bounds of literary criticism and become real. Her Croatian friend plays the part of Stavrogin, the Svengaliesque hero of The Demons , and Batuman and her friends take on the roles of Stavrogin's band of protorevolutionaries, who self-destruct under his baleful influence. It gives us Batuman's source for her title: The Possessed was an earlier translation of The Demons , and a reference to the Gadarene swine. As the title for her own book, it seems to me to have generally pessimistic implications--the world's self-destructive gallop over the cliff--which, however, I don't think Batuman really intended. She celebrates love and learning, and the cheerful absurdity of life. Above all she celebrates books, finishing up with the bold statement that 'If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that [literature] is where we're going to find them.'

Hobson, Charlotte

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Russian connection." Spectator, 7 May 2011, p. 35+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA256685727&it=r&asid=945345e804a9d48a8bcd8013b354933c. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A256685727

QUOTED: "Batuman's tale of personal discovery is as diverting and multi-threaded as a nineteenth century novel. And it's a great summer read."

THE POSSESSED
Paul E. Richardson
53.4 (July-August 2010): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Russian Information Services, Inc.
http://www.russianlife.net/
THE POSSESSED

Elif Batuman

FSG, $15

Recently, a blood relative with no past history of Russophilia took a Russian literature course in college. He was utterly enthralled and is now considering a year off to work in Mother Russia. Such is the power of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This uniquely compelling force of Russian literature is the central theme of Batuman's book, subtitled "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Yet the "people" here are mainly Batuman herself, and The Possessed largely a memoir of her intellectual explorations of the Russian literary landscape.

That does not make the book any less interesting. On the contrary, Batuman's first person narrative enlivens her exploration. Her self-deprecation and (at times astonishingly frank) openness about her own personal life make this a fascinating read. There is a remarkable breadth and combination of unexpected elements, from a hilarious conference on Isaac Babel, to an episode of CSI Tula, to her own bizarre attempt to transfuse Russian culture and literature by way of extended stays in Uzbekistan.

In short, Batuman's tale of personal discovery is as diverting and multi-threaded as a nineteenth century novel. And it's a great summer read that will help you rediscover your own initial fascination with all things Russian.

Richardson, Paul E.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Richardson, Paul E. "THE POSSESSED." Russian Life, July-Aug. 2010, p. 62+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA231542587&it=r&asid=da4c8b187556d5c1ad9b2f58f23d231c. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A231542587

QUOTED: "Candid and reflective, mischievous and erudite, Batuman writes nimble and passionate essays."

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Donna Seaman
106.12 (Feb. 15, 2010): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

By Elif Batuman.

Feb. 2010. 304p. Farrar, paper, $15

(9780374532185). 891.7.

Can the practice of literary scholarship and the art of literary criticism generate true tales of hilarity, pathos, and revelation? Yes, if you're Batuman, a writer of extraordinary verve and acumen who braids together academic adventures, travelogues, biography, and autobiography to create scintillating essays. A self-described "six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman" who grew up in New Jersey, Batuman became enthralled by the great Russian writers, studied Russian, and, after some rough spots, embraced the study of literature as her life calling. Precision is Batuman's path to both humor and intensity, whether she's writing about her fellow comparative-lit grad students at Stanford, "magic" library moments (such as discovering a link between Isaac Babel and King Kong), antic miscommunications at international literary conferences, a visit to St. Petersburg's ice palace, and, in several piquant installments, her strange summer in Samarkand, studying the Uzbek language and literature. Candid and reflective, mischievous and erudite, Batuman writes nimble and passionate essays celebrating the invaluable and pleasurable ways literature can "increase the sum total of human understanding."--Donna Seaman

Seaman, Donna

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA219830724&it=r&asid=937ba8f02f3e516b8a2a3efffda6d7a1. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A219830724

QUOTED: "This is ... a wildly entertaining romp through academia and the Russian literary pantheon."

Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Megan Hodge
134.19 (Nov. 15, 2009): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Farrar. Feb. 2010. c.304p. ISBN 979-0-374-53218-5. pap. $15. LIT

In her first book, a picaresque memoir, Rona Jaffe Prize--winning essayist Batuman (literature, Stanford Univ.) takes the reader on a journey both literary and physical as she traces the evolution of her fascination with Russian literature across the globe and several centuries. Batuman writes in a voice that is frank, droll, and at times dryly hysterical. Her devoted, sometimes tangential study of Russian language and literature and the Dickensian cast of characters she meets in its pursuit will strike a chord with anyone who has been to graduate school and amuse even those who haven't. Footnoted translations of quotations in foreign languages would be helpful, but this is otherwise a wildly entertaining romp through academia and the Russian literary pantheon that does justice to a literature that is deservedly praised but underread. VERDICT Highly recommended for book lovers of all sorts, especially fans of Russian literature or metanonfiction such as Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris and Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road.--Megan Hodge, Randolph-Macon Coll. Lib., Ashland, VA

Hodge, Megan

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hodge, Megan. "Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2009, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA212852461&it=r&asid=9123a5e56a9df3cef96f8fcb6b7bae7f. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A212852461

QUOTED: "Batuman is a superb storyteller with an eye for absurdist detail."

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
256.44 (Nov. 2, 2009): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15 paper (304p) ISBN 978-0-374-53218-5

Life imitates art--and even literary theory--in this scintillating collection of essays. Stanford lit prof Batuman (recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award) gleans clues to the conundrums of human existence by recalling scenes from her grad-student days in academe and exotic settings like Samarkand. A Tolstoy conference sparks her investigation into the possible murder, both physical and metaphysical, of the great man. She spends a summer in Samarkand reading impenetrable works in Old Uzbek as a window into Central Asia's enigmatic present. (Her baffled precis of one legend reads in part, "Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between chicken and sheep.") The book climaxes in a Dostoyevskian psychodrama that swirls around a magnetic grad student in the comp-lit department. Batuman is a superb storyteller with an eye for absurdist detail. Her pieces unfold like beguiling shaggy dog tales that blithely track her own misadventures into colorful exegeses of the fiction and biographies of the masters: she's the rare writer who can make the concept of "mimetic desire" vivid and personal. If you've ever felt like you're living in a Russian novel--and who hasn't?--Batuman will show you why. (Feb.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Publishers Weekly, 2 Nov. 2009, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA211359289&it=r&asid=68d6cf090b72e1ff3eecbcd9bd53b2d5. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A211359289

Elif Batuman: The Idiot
91.3-4 (May-August 2017): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Elif Batuman

The Idiot

Penguin

Even a fragment of the Boston Globe's review of Elif Batuman's debut novel would have hooked me: "At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature."This summer I'll travel to the Hungarian countryside (through Paris) with Selin, Batuman's heroine. And because she is universally hailed for her sense of humor, and because I like to balance reading fiction and essays, I'll order her essay collection as well--The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. (I'm one of those people.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Elif Batuman: The Idiot." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 3-4, 2017, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491539702&it=r&asid=d6db61ccf6bac2d4b59b513069449127. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491539702

"The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 89+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491250894&asid=81813e8314cb3c3ac076c6a272563a59. Accessed 25 July 2017. "The Idiot." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA487928042&asid=89e5de4b249179afa220fc247b70b62f. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Elif Batuman on Writer's Block, the Shame of Youth, and The Idiot, Her Great Novel About the Magical Early Age of Email." Vulture, 10 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA484857524&asid=7bf7828274f3ebc63f9f9ce2f156e403. Accessed 25 July 2017. Ohlsen, Becky. "Perfect imperfections." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA483701830&asid=9592b185d1f0cca3b59d0fb9459c76d5. Accessed 25 July 2017. Seaman, Donna. "The Idiot." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA481244745&asid=fc2eaf969aa5bb200aca30b834bb5443. Accessed 25 July 2017. "The Idiot." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA478696470&asid=545751086fc395c552ed624db5111301. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Batuman, Elif: THE IDIOT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA473652415&asid=59a1027bfaf032ea8bc01db0abb2d75c. Accessed 25 July 2017. Leiding, Reba. "Batuman, Elif. The Idiot." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA472371157&asid=2ffa054768c68f9b65ed4d2e34ace00c. Accessed 25 July 2017. "The Russian connection." Spectator, 7 May 2011, p. 35+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA256685727&asid=945345e804a9d48a8bcd8013b354933c. Accessed 25 July 2017. Richardson, Paul E. "THE POSSESSED." Russian Life, July-Aug. 2010, p. 62+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA231542587&asid=da4c8b187556d5c1ad9b2f58f23d231c. Accessed 25 July 2017. Seaman, Donna. "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA219830724&asid=937ba8f02f3e516b8a2a3efffda6d7a1. Accessed 25 July 2017. Hodge, Megan. "Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2009, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA212852461&asid=9123a5e56a9df3cef96f8fcb6b7bae7f. Accessed 25 July 2017. "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Publishers Weekly, 2 Nov. 2009, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA211359289&asid=68d6cf090b72e1ff3eecbcd9bd53b2d5. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Elif Batuman: The Idiot." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 3-4, 2017, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491539702&asid=d6db61ccf6bac2d4b59b513069449127. Accessed 25 July 2017.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/16/idiot-elif-batuman-review-life-lived-through-russian-novel
  Word count: 1286

  QUOTED: "The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selin’s friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice."

  The Idiot by Elif Batuman review – books v the world
  A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s

  Lara Feigel
  Friday 16 June 2017 07.30 BST

  Do events matter more when witnessed in real life than in books? Does language necessarily render experience second-hand? In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile; disconnected from lived experience. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot.

  At the start of the book, the autobiographical heroine Selin has just arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard and is worrying about how to live. How does she make friends? How does she fall in love? How does she come to understand the relationship between art and life, words and world? Taking a linguistics class, she disagrees with her teacher, who believes that people think in the same way whatever language they think in. Selin is sure that she’s formed by her languages – English and Turkish.

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  She is told by a new friend that she’s unusual in having an aesthetic view of the world rather than a moral one, and knows too that she has a pronounced tendency to live her life as a narrative. But what happens once you try to put other people into your story? The chance to explore this comes through email, which enables Selin to conduct a writing project with the potential to spill into life. An interesting aspect of The Idiot is that it’s a gently historical novel, offering a defamiliarised account of the mid to late 1990s. The plot would be quite different if the characters had mobile phones instead of landlines, and if email were less new and strange.

  At first, presented with a university email address, Selin doesn’t know what to use it for. However, she quickly discovers that she can create an email relationship more real than those she’s experiencing in the flesh. She writes to fellow student Ivan, an older boy in her Russian language class, putting them both in the personae of inhabitants of their Russian textbook. The characters in question are engaged in a doomed love affair, rendered peculiar by the limited beginner’s Russian available to them. In taking on these roles, Selin and Ivan are able to expose themselves to each other while hiding behind the barrier of fiction. Quickly, this relationship becomes more painfully affecting than any of Selin’s other friendships. She parses Ivan’s messages as she is learning to parse the texts in her classes, bemused by the enigmatic responses he offers her when she tries out tentative declarations of love. “The seduced atom has energies that seduce people,” he writes, perhaps speaking of her, “and these rarely get lost”.

  At every stage, Ivan encourages Selin only to rebuff her, too frightened to allow the world of print to take on living form
  What they have created seems to those around Selin both dangerous and unreal. But she remains a sincere enough reader to be convinced that the shared fantasy – the world brought into being by two minds – can have an existence of its own. Ivan is more ambivalent, or perhaps simply more fearful. “My love for you is for the person writing these letters,” he tells her, reminding her that he has a girlfriend already.

  At every stage, he encourages her only to rebuff her, apparently too frightened to allow the world of print to take on living form. What Selin is discovering is that however real the world created by language may be, we can disown it at any moment. Confronted by the physical reality of his girlfriend and her day-to-day claims, she cannot compete.

  A summary of this kind makes the novel sound like a treatise, which is exactly what it is not. The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selin’s friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice.

  Elif Batuman interview: ‘I thought racism and sexism were over. I was in for a rude awakening’
  Read more
  The likability tends to be confined to the female characters, however. In The Possessed Batuman describes herself at this age as guided by Isabel Archer’s observation in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady that “one should never regret a generous error”. In the novel, Isabel is thwarted by marrying a man capable neither of generosity nor of seeing himself at fault. Selin makes a similar mistake in her choice of Ivan. Though they both lead each other on without quite knowing what they are setting loose, Ivan’s fault is greater because there’s a sense that he is never prepared to relinquish control or risk any vulnerability.

  What is at stake here is whether Selin can continue to commit generous errors in the face of such humiliation; whether she can continue so earnestly in her attempt to learn how to live. The triumph of Batuman’s book is to make this period of youth matter. The narrator occasionally mocks the immaturity of the protagonist, and Selin knows that the stories she writes are bad and the experiences she has are provisional because she is so young. However, the questions she is asking about the world are questions to take seriously; the novel discourages us from dismissing them as youthful preoccupations.

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  We can allow words to shape our world and allow the books we read to guide us as we direct and interpret our lives. And, most importantly, we can make generous errors. The book’s epigraph is from Marcel Proust and it is brilliantly chosen. In Within a Budding Grove, the narrator remarks that there is hardly an action we perform in our youth that we don’t later long to annul. But what we ought to regret, he says, is not the actions of the past but the fact that we no longer possess the spontaneity that made us perform them. “Adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”

  • Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury).

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