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Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - Brooklyn Magazine

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Standing on a shuttle bus, listening to her Walkman and watching people on the street below, eighteen-year-old Harvard freshman Selin experiences a car crash: “Things changed somehow, and I was on the floor.” This, in Elif Batuman’s debut novel and second book, The Idiot, is one of the strangest descriptions of falling I’ve ever read. Intensely disembodied—there’s no mention of how it feels to lose your balance, to be suspended midair, to hit the ground—it’s as if Selin experiences her life by way of a submarine’s periscope. How much of this quality is due to Selin herself, an expression of her peculiar character, and how much of this come from Batuman’s prose style? I was often reminded, as I read The Idiot, of English translations of 19th century Russian literature. (Batuman’s title, her second borrowed from Dostoevsky, encourages the comparison.) Its sentences read like they didn’t begin in English, just that English is where they happen to have ended up. Here’s one way to describe

--> Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - BKMAG Advertisement --> Uncategorized | Apr 4, 2017 Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot By Molly McArdle Standing on a shuttle bus, listening to her Walkman and watching people on the street below, eighteen-year-old Harvard freshman Selin experiences a car crash: “Things changed somehow, and I was on the floor.” This, in Elif Batuman’s debut novel and second book, The Idiot , is one of the strangest descriptions of falling I’ve ever read. Intensely disembodied—there’s no mention of how it feels to lose yo

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