THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman
The Idiot follows one Harvard freshman’s hilarious and honest journey to discover the true meaning of meaning by way of academia and/or email correspondence with an enigmatic senior from Russian class named Ivan.
She signs up for Russian, linguistics, literature, and psychology of language classes, absorbing and testing the alleged knowledge espoused by her professors in the hope that it will reveal, or at the very least point her in the direction of, meaning. Selin doesn’t like she doesn’t know what anything means; she can’t articulate what makes something mean anything. She hopes understanding the meaning of meaning will teach her about being a writer, about being in love, about purpose and value and beauty.
She quickly realizes, though, that learning anything of value in college is significantly harder than it initially appears (SPOILER ALERT if you are NOT FAMILIAR with the plot of ANNA KARENINA):
“It was hard to decide on a literature class. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naïve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important. I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant.”
Another cold Boston morning, she is hit by the following realization that catalyzes her decision to skip class:
“One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn’t going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac’s Paris was extremely comprehensive.”
She is disappointed and confused by the break down in communication that exists between students and professors, as well as by the absurdity of the learning process, to the extremely amusing point where she entertains the possibility that meaning might actually be in math, not language. I couldn’t help but admire and sympathize with poor Selin as she quasi-valiantly grapples with a logic class called “Sets, Groups, and Topology:”
“When I tuned in, Tamás Pál (the professor) was talking about how it was impossible to trisect an angle. ‘This is probably counterintuitive,’ he said. I couldn’t imagine what it would mean for an angle to be impossible to trisect. If a thing existed, couldn’t you cut it in three?”
In Russian class, she meets Ivan: tall, dark, mysterious, Hungarian, a senior. Ivan is the first person at Harvard Selin is truly intrigued by; she senses they might have something deep - something of meaning? she wonders - in common in the ways in which they look at and interact with the world. Selin and Ivan begin an email correspondence, which begins innocently enough but ultimately culminates in Selin agreeing to spend the summer teaching English to children in Hungarian countryside villages.
Selin becomes addicted to the enigma of Ivan. She wants to understand him because she feels that there is something of her in him, yet she understands about half of what he tells her: “I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it.”
This book brought me right back to college. It’s a coming-of-age sort of novel told through the eyes of a fantastic protagonist. It almost feels like Selin keeps asking for a hammer in her quest to understand the world but is instead handed other tools that are of little to no use for her purposes: a screwdriver, a wrench, a bit of string.
She is sharp, thoughtful, kind, funny, and willing to accept anything anyone tells her until it starts to not make sense (which is where her humor comes in). I was cracking up on every other page, and turned the last page with 164 (!!) highlights.
The lightness of Selin’s experiences belie a dense, heavy underbelly of the novel that grapples with big questions and is ultimately a bit depressing. The reading experience is, I believe, captured in the below excerpt if one substitutes “The Idiot by Elif Batuman” for “Hungary:”
“Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide.”
