2025 Reading – Book 8

Book 8: The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Right off the bat, I wrote a 3000 word essay because of this book and thankfully, a literary magazine published my essay, as well. It would seem as though it has been a lucky book for me. But was it good? One way to find out is to make time to read the long form essay, and the other is to read on.

Sometimes, we need a meandering book. A book that is a flaneur in the lives of the characters themselves, and does nothing more than that. Of course, there are ways to make this kind of a book fun, but I didn’t think The Idiot can be categorised as such. It is a sketch of a young, Turkish-American woman who gets into Harvard and her uneventful days on the campus pining over a man named Ivan.

What I liked about the book is that the main character doesn’t presume any intelligence and lends none of it to the plot. She is threadbare in her thoughts and her life, and probably the most interesting thing that happens to her is her friend Svetlana and a trip to Hungary to teach kids the English Language. After surrendering to the character’s prosaic life, it became interesting to read this novel. I enjoyed the humdrum nature of her days and lived in that world for some time.

I picked up this book on a whim at a footpath library in my city. I lived inside its pages for a couple of weeks. Would I recommend it? Yes. Not all books have to be a performance. They just have to take you somewhere for a while. That’s what it did for me.

🌟 3/5