The Idiot (2017)

By Elif Batuman

432pp, Fiction

Notes

2020-12-27

I finished Elif Batuman’s debut novel. It was genuinely funny, though occasionally difficult to read (in a wincing in sympathetic recognition kind of way). I feel like I was definitely an idiot during my late teens early twenties and the fact that my university experience happened at the same time as the novel gives the whole thing an extra layer. The feeling of email on a UNIX terminal is brilliantly evoked. The situations where you’re waiting for someone and you don’t have a mobile phone too… a kind of mild anxiety but also, from today’s vantage point a great sense of freedom.