Elif ‘s novel highlighting the academic life

Elif Batuman’s first novel, the main character a Turkish-American student named Selin, has a conversation with her university friend Svetlana about if one’s life should be thought as a story. “ Everyone experiences their own life as a narrative, If you didn’t have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?  that is saying the narrative is just memory plus causality, according to Selin and Svetlana responds, “ But, for us, the narrative has aesthetic too. Isn’t it more about how much money our parents have?”

 Batuman, who hails from Turkey, has a PhD in comparative literature and a fondness for Dostoyevskian titles, is the celebrated staff writer for the New Yorker.

The Idiot book is about Selin’s experiences as a student at Harvard, where she encounters linguistic theory and Hungarian mathematician named Ivan. In the 1990s when people used to listen to CDs and make each other mixtapes. The email was in a slightly mysterious form of communication as phones are emphatically immobile.

At the University Selin signs up for various courses, as she teaches Algebra and English to immigrants. She reads Proust and Mann, and Flaubert. She learns about the “infinite uselessness” of Freudian analysis and literary criticism and sends endearing emails to Ivan.

The Idiot is a very funny book, full of zingy one-liners and her observations about the absurdities of academia and adolescence.

The academics murder the books she loves in order to dissect them.

During summer holidays Selin travels to Europe, following Ivan to Hungry so that he can teach English to Hungarian children.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman, Jonathan Cape £16.99. Penguin Press $27, 432 pages.