![]() I sat on one chair, she on the other, and we talked about narrative, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language. We sat in a small alcove that had two chairs, a small table, and a couch. I met Elif at a coffee shop in New York’s Financial District. Its protagonist, Selin Karadag, is a tall, Turkish American freshman at Harvard who wants to be a writer, learns Russian, discovers email, and becomes involved with a Hungarian mathematician named Ivan. The Idiot-its title, like The Possessed, also a nod to the Dostoevsky novels-is an autobiographical campus novel set in 1995. And while she’s primarily known for journalism-writing on everything from religion in Turkey to the popularity of the bison-Batuman says that her original intent was always to be part of the world of fiction.īatuman was working on a different book when she came back to the manuscript from fifteen years before, and was instantly absorbed. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Though Batuman became well-known with her 2010 essay collection The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, she wrote this novel first, as a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college and living in San Francisco. The Idiot is Elif Batuman’s second book, but the novel could also be considered the New Yorker writer’s true debut. ![]()
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