title: The Idiot: A Novel
author:  Elif Batuman 
description: Easily the funniest book Ive read this year. <b><i>GQ<br /></i></b><br /> Masterly funny debut novel . . Erudite but never pretentious, <i>The Idiot</i> will make you crave more books by Batuman. <b>Sloane Crosley, </b><i><b>Vanity Fair </b></i><br /><br />Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . . Batumans writing is funny and deadpan, and Selins observations tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship, social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will quietly amuse and provoke thought. <b><i>Huffington Post</i></b><br /><br />Batumans brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.<b><i>People</i></b><br /><br /> Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is a sentimental education, its one leavened by a great deal of mordant and delightful humor. . . . At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, The Idiot is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman. <b><i>Boston Globe</i></b><br /><br /><i>The Idiot</i>is an impressive debut with a ridiculous amount of charm and a protagonist so relatable shes almost impossible to forget.<b> A.V. Club</b><br /><br />The Idiotis wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the<i>New Yorker</i>and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection<i>The Possessed</i>(2010), has brave and original ideas about what a novel might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language . . . . It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone whos successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her protagonists intellectual vertigo with maturity and common sense.<b> <i>Slate<br /></i></b><br /> Beautifully written first novelBatuman, a staff writer for the <i>New Yorker,</i> has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to sketching characterThe novel fairly brims with provocative ideas about language, literature and culture. <b><i> The Associated Press</i></b> <br /><br /> A vibrant novel of ideas . . . Like her essays, Batumans bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives. <b><i>San Francisco Chronicle<br /></i></b><br />With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection The Possessed, Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st centurys great love letters to reading . . . It was a tour de force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary obsession . . . A different  though no less tenuous  variety of possession is explored in The Idiot, Batumans first novel . . . The books pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent, she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely observed world . . . Selins is a consciousness one does not want to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time, she writes, the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that<i>that</i>was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. Batuman articulates those little moments  of revelation and of emptiness  as well as anyone writing today. The books legacy seems destined to be one of observation, not character  though when the observer is this gifted, is that really any wonder?<b><i>LA Times</i></b><br /><br /><br /> No one writes funnier or more stylishly about higher education. Nothing written about grad school is as entertaining as her 2010 collection of dispatches from Stanford's comparative-literature department,The Possessed, and her studied satire of Harvard inThe Idiotis nearly its equal.<b><i>Village Voice</i></b><br /><br /><br />Batumans sardonic wit makes for a delectable unfolding of Selins experience of love, life and language.<b>BBC.com</b><br /><br />"Batumans novel is roaringly funny. It is also intellectually subtle, surprising, and enlightening. It is a book fueled by deadpan wonder."<b><i>New York Review of Books</i></b><br /><br />Charming, hilarious and wise debut novel . . . Batuman titled the book<i>The Idiot</i>(after Dostoevskys famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor, silly idiot, she seems to be saying.<i>The Idiot</i>, a novel of innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude that Dag Hammarskjld expressed in his memoir<i>Markings</i>, "For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!"<b><i>Dallas News</i></b><br /><br /><i>The Idiot</i>is half<i>The Education of Henry Adams</i>and half<i>Innocents Abroad</i>. Twain would have savored Selin's first international trip to Paris, Hungary and TurkeyOur first footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be missed."<br /><b><i>Shelf Awareness</i></b> <br /><br />Selin is entrancingso smart, so clueless, so funnyand Batumans exceptional discernment,<br /> comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a self.<br /><b> <i>Booklist</i> (starred review)<br /></b><br />Wonderful first novel . . . 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 its possible to be sincere without sounding pretentious, and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.<br /><b> <i>Publishers Weekly</i>(starred review)</b><br /><br />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. Readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful. <br /><b><i>Kirkus Reviews </i>(starred)</b><br /><br />Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. Inspare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years.<br /><b>Mary Karr, author of <i>The Art of Memoir</i>, <i>Lit</i>, and <i>The Liars Club</i></b><br /><br />Im not Turkish, I dont have a Serbian best friend, Im not in love with a Hungarian, I dont go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. <i>The Idiot</i> is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.<br /><b>Miranda July, author of <i>The First Bad Man</i> and <i>It Chooses You </i></b><br /><br />Elif Batumans novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.<br /><b>Joseph ONeill, author of <i>The Dog</i> and <i>Netherland</i></b><br /> <br /> Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique <i>bildungsroman</i>: one more fascinated with whats going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than whats going on inside her.<br /><b>Sheila Heti, author of <i>How Should a Person Be? </i>and <i>Ticknor</i></b>
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  # Family Secrets
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Cayce Poponea
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2021 by Cayce Poponea
  
  
  All rights reserved.
  
  
  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
  mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
  written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in
  a book review.
  
  
  _This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
  coincidental._
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _First Edition: January 2021_
  
  
  _This paperback edition first published in 2021_
  
  
  _Jacket photograph copyright 2021 © Shutterstock images_
  
  
  _Design by Jada Dlee_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  To all of you, for without your hunger for the ultimate bad-boy, I’d be a
  rambling idiot.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Introduc