The Idiot

The Idiot by Elif Batuman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At first this seemed like nothing more than a rather detailed telling of a Turkish-American's first year at Harvard. Which was a little slow and irritating. Because if you get to go to Harvard, like actually go to class. But about half-way through I realized each episode was an encounter with language, how it can often be a vehicle for miscommunication than for communication, and it became much more interesting. Selin's dorky stumbling through her first years of independence, trying to become a writer, and navigating new relationships and encountering new world views became a sort of cozy reprieve to my day.

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I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix,-miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth. The suffix-miş had no exact English equivalent. It could be translated as “it seems” or “I heard” or “apparently.” I associated it with Dilek, my cousin on my father’s side—tiny, skinny, dark-complexioned Dilek, who was my age but so much smaller. “You complained-miş to your mother,” Dilek would tell me in her quiet, precise voice. “The dog scared-miş you.” “You told-miş your parents that if Aunt Hülya came to America, she could live in your garage.” When you heard-miş, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence—not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. Every time I heard it, I felt caught out. I was scared of the dogs. I did complain to my mother, often. The-miş tense was one of the things I complained to my mother about. My mother thought it was funny.

Why was subtraction always harder than addition?

Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see?

WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM. I had seen this inscription countless times, without really thinking about it. It was a good question. What was man? It occurred to me that I could be less mindful of man, and I seemed to catch a glimpse of freedom.

Love at first sight is possible only because you recognize a type. You’re already looking for him.

She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”

you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language.

Talking with Dawn felt so different from talking with Ivan that Ivan seemed almost not to exist anymore.

How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?

I wondered if it was true that different people gravitated toward different kinds of situations.

love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”

For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in another sense we were all here at once.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door.

Within minutes the sun was blazing as if it didn’t remember a thing.