The Idiot

It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is deter-mined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer.

In between studying psycho-linguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class. She spends the summer in the Hungarian countryside teaching English to village children, where sad and comic misunderstandings ensue.

Full of the razor-sharp evocations of character and place that have long delighted readers of Batuman's non-fiction, The Idiot tackles literary ambition, female friend-ship, the American dream, Chomskian linguistics, the Russian novel and romantic love. `There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul,' Proust once wrote, `but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.'