The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is a sheer delight after all! There was a rather gigantic heap of reviews and reactions I devoured before finally deciding to read Elif Batuman's The Idiot. And so I had an idea of what to expect. I knew that I would read this book not for its plot, but for its energy, its vibe! 

The Idiot begins with an exceptionally fitting passage from Proust's Within a Budding Grove, about the ridiculous complexity and hilarity of adolescence. The story of our protagonist, Selin, is loosely wound around her life as a freshman at Harvard, the different classes she takes, the things she hopes to learn from them, and those she actually does. This time is arguably her most formative, a new life has opened itself to her. There are hurdles as well as pitstops along the road, and she tries, in her unique ways, to find her footing. There is a slew of inter-cultural exchanges in her every-day life; she stands at the eye of a storm of people from all over the world, and slowly discovers herself in the process! Eventually, she volunteers to teach English to children in a small Hungarian village. She dreams of one day becoming a writer.

Selin's experiences with language are easily the most dazzling parts of the book. She ponders forms of expression in English, Russian, Spanish, Hungarian and Turkish. "I liked the idea of watching Spanish movies in Spanish, of learning about a different world in the language it had been thought up in", she says. In many ways, language is what binds her to the people around her. Her musings and trains of thought meander inseparably along with her relationships and interactions with people; especially as she finds herself falling in love with Ivan. Their email exchanges are spontaneous, funny, devious, intensely intimate and, at times, also detached and aloof. They talk about how they've exhausted words and language and meaning. How in math one could write down exactly what one thought, and there would doubtless be only a single way to comprehend it; but feelings, on the other hand, are so mysteriously hard to articulate. They call it 'falling out of language'. I'm convinced that this is probably as close to perfect as English can get to describing it.

Batuman draws us headfirst into the pains and perils of longing. Selin's hope and despair born of an unrequited first love is a bittersweet saga. 

"An elixir of love - what an idea. You loved that one, the one who didn't love you, so what good was an elixir that turned her into someone else?"

I observe it is distantly representative of times when gaps and holes in communication are the culprits. The blatant lack of a bridge between Selin and Ivan's correspondence was often bothersome to me.  Perhaps in real life, too, people struggle to say simple things because of the weight they want their words to carry.

Selin's narrative voice is astutely observant and full of quick, dry humor. Her wit is a pleasant surprise often in the most unpredictable and unexpected places. She looks at the world with quiet curiosity. She is confounded by and lost in the illusions and mirages of the world and of the people in it. She understands that there are questions she doesn't have the answers to, and problems she might not be able to solve, and in that she is like so many of us. "It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened." 

Throughout the course of The Idiot, Batuman attempts to express the inexplicable, and disentangle the chaotic. Much of the book is really Selin's reflections, in which I found many of my own ideas mirrored, albeit better composed. How is it always so heartening to see one's thoughts and experiences reciprocated in somebody else? Maybe that is one of the unique ways humans are built. 

I enjoyed reading The Idiot a little too much, I think, but the ending seemed to me to be very abrupt, almost like a non-ending! Like the projector going out just before the final scene. On the bright side, though, this is precisely why I crave to read the sequel, Either/Or.