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The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

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To commemorate my first semester of college, I decided to revisit Elif Batuman’s 2017 fiction debut and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot. Set in 1995, the novel follows its narrator Selin through her first year of college and summer abroad. She receives her first email address, veers ambitiously from discipline to discipline, and falls in love with someone who doesn’t love her back. A linguistics major at Harvard, Selin spends much of her time absorbed by language and the different ways in which people communicate with each other, yet are seemingly incapable of doing so in a way that matters. Selin is young and inexperienced compared to Ivan, a senior mathematics student whom she meets in Russian class. The two develop a relationship through which Batuman explores the plight of sincere communication: they exchange weekly emails, as suggestive and elaborate as they are insubstantial; Ivan even admits to Selin, “My love for you is for the person writing your letters,” an apt portrayal o

The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – Berkeley Fiction Review Skip to content March 8, 2023 The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction To commemorate my first semester of college, I decided to revisit Elif Batuman’s 2017 fiction debut and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot . Set in 1995, the novel follows its narrator Selin through her first year of college and summer abroad. She receives her first email address, veers ambitiously from discipline to discipline, and falls in love with someone who doesn’t love her back. A linguistics major at Harvard, Selin spends much of h

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