The descriptions of Selin’s experiences in a foreign country are spot-on, from her fear that her various host families think she’s an idiot to an odd side trip with intensely friendly strangers. Selin, unfortunately, is slow to learn this lesson.Ĭome summer, she takes a job teaching English in the Hungarian countryside, mostly to be close to Ivan, who is visiting his family. She instead finds happiness in her own choices. By the tale’s end, Nina realizes she does not need Ivan. The text is instructive, meant to introduce language learners to increasingly difficult and complex vocabulary, but the story is also thematically relevant. Nina chases her almost-paramour to Siberia, obviously. Running parallel to the correspondence, the novel presents a text from the Russian class, “Nina in Siberia,” which tells the story of the eponymous young woman, foolishly in love with her own Ivan. Studiously avoiding each other in real life, the two exchange missives back and forth. As Selin struggles to figure out her place in the university’s micro-society, she develops a friendship with Svetlana, a Slovakian student, and begins an email correspondence with Ivan, a graduate student in her Russian language class. “You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed material,” Selin notes, “mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, register for student loans.” Selin’s assessments are dry, and much of the book’s initial humor comes from her bewilderment at what seems clear to everyone around her. In short order, she obtains her first email address, two roommates, and a growing sense of her new environment. Here we have Selin, daughter of Turkish immigrants, arriving at Harvard in 1995. How fitting, then, that Batuman’s strikingly funny, precisely observed first novel, The Idiot, shares its title with the work of another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Elif Batuman tweets under the handle BananaKarenina-a humorous nod toward a great Russian novelist’s depiction of a woman’s dangerous tangle with love.
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