“Both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case yet-and this was ironic-there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. “I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book,” she says, in her signature deadpan. She applies to a freshman literature seminar because “everyone said was of utmost importance” and shows up to her interview with a cold. She enrolls in arcane-sounding courses on “constructed worlds” and the theory of language. Selin, having arrived (as Batuman did) for her freshman year at Harvard in the mid-’90s, obsesses over why the world is the way it is, and not some other unaccountable way. Her protagonist Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, spends most of the book in a philosophical crisis. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language. Batuman, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection The Possessed (2010), has brave and original ideas about what a “novel” might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.Īny changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.To be clear, The Idiot is wonderful.

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The idiot book elif