Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
發表於2024-12-22
The Idiot 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
It kind of fell down when I went to the end, about Sonya’s journey in the Hungarian countryside. Nevertheless, it’s still a refreshing novel, and you hardly get tired of it. Some of Sonya’s feelings towards Ivan struck me with great resemblance. She seem...
評分It kind of fell down when I went to the end, about Sonya’s journey in the Hungarian countryside. Nevertheless, it’s still a refreshing novel, and you hardly get tired of it. Some of Sonya’s feelings towards Ivan struck me with great resemblance. She seem...
評分It kind of fell down when I went to the end, about Sonya’s journey in the Hungarian countryside. Nevertheless, it’s still a refreshing novel, and you hardly get tired of it. Some of Sonya’s feelings towards Ivan struck me with great resemblance. She seem...
評分It kind of fell down when I went to the end, about Sonya’s journey in the Hungarian countryside. Nevertheless, it’s still a refreshing novel, and you hardly get tired of it. Some of Sonya’s feelings towards Ivan struck me with great resemblance. She seem...
評分I said bye first, to be brave. I still thought bravery would be somehow rewarded." 一本完全沒有想到自己會喜歡的書:絮絮叨叨,自傳色彩明顯,設定在Harvard——然而卻一再從中看到一些逝去的片段,簡直讓人羞赧。 看完之後纔意識到,其實閱讀過程中一直在懸心期待一個ha...
圖書標籤: 文學 女性 美國 小說 美國文學 大學生 英文原版 Harvard
聽作者本人讀的有聲書。照理說一個少女在90年代Havard的瑣碎日常應該乏善可陳,沒想到一路興緻勃勃地都聽得很起勁,作者的聲音有點天真無辜。太過直白的睏惑和仿佛不自知的幽默感竟然令人著迷。Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives. The obstacles to understanding are enormous. Goodbye language, goodbye Selin and Ivan.
評分This is my fav novel in 2019. 彌補我被H拒的遺憾吧。
評分太everyday mundane瞭 就算是harvard也看不下去
評分我喜歡Selin 也喜歡Ivan 但Selin和Ivan都不斷地讓我想起一個人 Selin好像一直處在低落的情緒狀態裏 而Ivan則是對什麼都無所謂的樣子 我喜歡他們的email往來 像自說自話又像一個人的想法未經任何麯解抵達瞭另一個人的心裏 可能就是這種奇怪的chillness讓我在不斷地想要放棄中又繼續瞭下去 但今晚我真的太悲傷瞭 我決定不要再繼續看下去瞭 因為我早就決定再也不要想起那個人瞭 也可能 是這本書提醒瞭我有些情緒我真的無法再次承受
評分我喜歡Selin 也喜歡Ivan 但Selin和Ivan都不斷地讓我想起一個人 Selin好像一直處在低落的情緒狀態裏 而Ivan則是對什麼都無所謂的樣子 我喜歡他們的email往來 像自說自話又像一個人的想法未經任何麯解抵達瞭另一個人的心裏 可能就是這種奇怪的chillness讓我在不斷地想要放棄中又繼續瞭下去 但今晚我真的太悲傷瞭 我決定不要再繼續看下去瞭 因為我早就決定再也不要想起那個人瞭 也可能 是這本書提醒瞭我有些情緒我真的無法再次承受
The Idiot 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載