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Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/BATUMAN | 31480010944921 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32114002352897 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION BATUMAN | 31330009310719 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Boxford Town Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32115002016226 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | F BATUMA | 32116003427271 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F BATUMAN | 32117001883069 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32120001199882 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | FIC BATUMAN | 37003701670540 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32121000727749 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC BATUMAN | 30470001528115 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/BATUMAN E | 31479006832181 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC BATUMAN, ELIF | 32122002581852 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F BAT | 32125001214995 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC BAT | 31548003061984 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F BATUMAN | 32126001786339 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | BAT | 32127001136343 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC BATUMAN E | 32128003517241 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F BATUMAN | 31478010082148 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC BATUMAN, E. | 31550002222724 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32129002201472 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Salisbury Public Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32131000769260 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | FIC BATUMAN | 32133002617497 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tyngsborough Public Library | FIC/BATUM | 32137001807934 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F BATUMAN | 31990004641655 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION BATUMAN, ELIF | 32136003214958 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
"An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down."
--Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You
"Easily the funniest book I've read this year."
-- GQ
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 * Mashable One * Elle Magazine * The New York Times * Bookpage * Vogue * NPR * Buzzfeed * The Millions
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The mysterious relationship between language and the world" is just one of the questions troubling Selin Karadag, the 18-year-old protagonist of Batuman's (The Possessed) wonderful first novel, a bildungsroman Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence. Beginning her first year at Harvard in the fall of 1995, Selin is determined to "be a courageous person, uncowed by other people's dumb opinions"; she already thinks of herself as a writer, although "this conviction was completely independent of having ever written anything." In a Russian class, the Turkish-American Selin is befriended by the worldlier Svetlana, whose Serbian family has endowed her with capital and complexes, and the older Hungarian math major Ivan, who becomes Selin's correspondent in an exciting new medium: email. Their late-night exchanges inspire Selin more than anything else in her life, but they frustrate her, too: Ivan's intentions toward her are vague, perhaps even to himself. Traveling to Paris with Svetlana in the summer of 1996, Selin plans to continue on to Hungary, where she will teach English in a village school, and then to Turkey, where her extended family resides. Thus Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it's possible "to be sincere without sounding pretentious," and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Batuman, winner of a Whiting Award and The Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize for Humor, lifted a title from Dostoevsky for her first book, the superb essay collection, The Possessed (2010). She does it again with her debut novel, a droll, semiautobiographical tale set in 1995 and narrated by a high-strung freshman at Harvard. A tall Turkish American from New Jersey, Selin is at once enthralled and frustrated by language, while finding mundane aspects of life indecipherable. She takes a mishmash of classes; struggles to tutor adults trying to earn their GED; becomes friends with Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb; and obsesses over Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics major. Selin feels dangerously overwhelmed, yet declares, I wanted to be unconventional and say meaningful things. Ivan is similarly disassociated from the norm, and the two conduct a hilariously cryptic courtship that culminates with Selin spending the summer teaching English in a Hungarian village and enduring a sequence of alarming excursions. Batuman's brainy, polymorphously curious innocent, her idiot, ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape feelings and experiences, how differently men and women are treated, and how baffling love is. Selin is entrancing so smart, so clueless, so funny and Batuman's exceptional discernment, comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of the messy forging of a self.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE IDIOT, by Elif Batuman. (Penguin, $16.) This loosely autobiographical novel - which our reviewer, Parul Sehgal, called "a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book" - charts the college life of Selin, a bookish naif at Harvard in the mid-1990s. The story borrows from Batuman's earlier work - heavy on Russophilia and kooky anecdotes - but offers a portrait of the intellectual and emotional development of an irresistible narrator. THE GAMES: A Global History of the Olympics, by David Goldblatt. (Norton, $17.95.) Goldblatt traces the glories and the stumbles of the modern Games, first held in Athens in 1896. Sexism, antiSemitism and racism have all plagued the Olympics for decades, as have scandals over worker conditions and concerns about doping. The book delves into the origins of beloved events like the marathon. SHADOWBAHN, by Steve Erickson. (Blue Rider, $16.) Twenty years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the twin towers inexplicably crop up in the South Dakota badlands, inhabited by Elvis's stillborn twin brother. Our reviewer, Fiona Maazel, compared the novel to "a polyphonic dirge for an America that has perhaps never lived anywhere but in the imagination of those of us who keep fighting for it anyway." WHITE TEARS, by Hari Kunzru. (Vintage, $16.) Seth and Carter, two 20-something New Yorkers, are music-obsessed and imagine themselves as cutting-edge producers. The pair release a track - a recent recording from Washington Square - but pass it off as a relic from Charlie Shaw, a singer of their invention supposedly lost to history. When the hoax gets traction, it sets off a ghost story that touches on appropriation, race and the blues. The novel benefits from Kunzru's cleareyed and canny view of America's cultural shifts. AGAINST EMPATHY: The Case for Radical Compassion, by Paul Bloom. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Bloom, a Yale psychology professor, urges a reconsideration of the roles that emotions play in moral decisions; as he puts it, "I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts." THEMEN IN MY LIFE: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan, by Patricia Bosworth. (Harper/ HarperCollins, $17.99.) Bosworth is perhaps best known as a biographer of stars like Diane Arbus and Montgomery Clift; her autobiography follows her navigating a glamorous career and sexual coming-of-age. But she doesn't give short shrift to what she calls "the bereaved creature inside me," mourning her brother and father.
Guardian Review
The American author on speed-reading The Second Sex, the book that made her cry and how Marie Kondo changed her life The book I am currently reading Last month, I was a writer in residence at The Mount, Edith Wharton's house in Lenox, Massachusetts, and I'm on week six of an Edith Wharton kick. I'm rereading The House of Mirth now, for the third time, but it's so different each time - I almost expect it to end differently. (It could happen, right?) The book that changed my life Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word "life-changing" in the title: Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. I have read it three times - much like The House of Mirth. (Would the house have been more mirthful if the socks had been folded and stored upright?) I found it totally gripping - like an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book. The book that influenced my writing Proust's In Search of Lost Time, especially Time Regained, made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again. As I get older, I realise, repeatedly, that it isn't always easy to draw a clear line between "realising" and "remembering". I was recently reminded one of Henry James's characters is named Fanny Assingham, and I momentarily lost it The book that changed my mind While working on an article about "rental relatives" - you can hire out a mother, or a son - in Japan, I was trying to track down a claim about capitalism and unconditional love, and found myself trying to speed-read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in one afternoon. Although I thought I knew what the book was about, I realised that I hadn't read it, and didn't know what it was about, and that my ideas about the relationship between capitalism and unconditional love are in more flux than I was aware. Now I have to read The Second Sex. The book I wish I'd written I actually really wish I had written The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book. The last book that made me cry I started to cry the other day when I read a quote from Don Quixote that I found in a file on my computer. It's Sancho Panza speaking at Quixote's deathbed: "Look, don't be lazy, but get up out of bed, and let's go out into the fields dressed as shepherds, the way we agreed to: maybe we'll find my lady Doña Dulcinea behind some bush, disenchanted, and what could be better than that?" The last book that made me laugh I was recently reminded that there is a character in Henry James's The Golden Bowl named Fanny Assingham, and I momentarily lost it. The book I'm most ashamed not to have read I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things. I do wish I had read The Second Sex by now. My earliest reading memory My father taught me how to read, using Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books, when I was three. Then he proudly told everyone that I'd taught myself how to read. My comfort read How about my stress read? That definitely has to be Epictetus's Discourses and Selected Writings - I have it on my phone and once started reading it during a dental procedure. - Elif Batuman.
Library Journal Review
Batuman makes her fiction debut already a literary darling: a New Yorker staff writer since 2010 and the author of a much-adored essay collection, The Possessed, about the pleasurable intricacies of reading Russian literature. The year is 1995, and Turkish American 18-year-old Selin enters Harvard. She takes classes and makes friends, but her most important connection develops via email-new and enigmatic back then-with Ivan, an older student she rarely sees although she pines for his virtual missives. With freshman year over, she stops through France on her way to Hungary-because Ivan is there-where she'll be teaching English in a small village. Back at Harvard in the fall, she realizes, "I hadn't learned anything at all." In 2006, her "Short Story & Novel" contribution to highbrow literary journal n+1 included the line: "Write long novels, pointless novels." The Idiot is just that. As if to add further emphasis, Batuman plods through almost 14 hours of narration. With a novel so thoroughly hyped, listed, and award-predicted, perhaps disappointment is inevitable. VERDICT Despite Batuman's obvious erudition, crafting gorgeous phrases and being fluent in both philosophy and philology aren't enough to redeem this Idiot. ["Highly detailed and determinedly linear": LJ 12/16 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.