‘On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The “address” had my last name in it – Karadağ, but all lowercase and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. “The g is silent,” I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn’t understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable’.
Described as ‘A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself’, The Idiot by Elif Batuman is a bildungsroman of sorts. At its epicentre is the awkward Selin, a young woman of Turkish American heritage who is attending Harvard College as an undergraduate student in the mid-nineties. It’s the new age of emails – a very recent invention that is still finding its place within people’s day to day lives. Traversing the uncertainty of university life, new friendships and young love, Selin provides a dry and witty commentary to her experiences and interactions. Opting to take ‘the less conservative and more generous’ route when confronted with choice, Selin finds herself entangled in a confusing and ever-frustrating tête-à-tête via email which sees her fly off to Hungary in the summer to teach English. As a character intrigued by the use of language and communication, obsessed with reading and finding meaning, The Idiot provides many an opportunity for humour.
