When reading a book for review, I like to highlight passages that I find memorable, lines that I could later quote. Typically, I end up with 15-20 such markings for a book of 250-300 pages. In the case of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot , which I read on a Kindle app, I gave up after 50 pages because I found myself pausing every 30 seconds or so to daub the text in purple. It made me worry that if I kept on, I might never finish the book.
This is a novel that, to paraphrase one of the characters, you want to read slowly, so that you can “feel” the words. It is comic but with added melancholy. The funny lines make you smile but are also wistful.
Sample this: at the airport: “we stood watching the luggage pass us by like barrels in the river of time.” On math: “His favourite thing about math was that the relationship between thinking and writing was so direct — you wrote math just the way you thought it.”
Falling through the gap
What is implied, of course, is that human language is not math. Language, by its very nature, is incapable of closing the gap between inner life and external communication, between feelings and words, between literature and life, between what is expressed and what is understood. It is in this gap, which constitutes a perennial deficit of understanding, that Batuman’s novel finds its tension and narrative energy.
The Idiot is an autobiographical Bildungsroman that is forever on the verge of becoming a romance. Set in 1995, in the early years of e-mail, and before social media turned communication into a matter of instant gratification, it tracks an 18-year-old’s quest for a narrative self that matches with who she thinks she is or wants to be.
Selin, like Batuman, is Turkish-American. As a freshman in Harvard, she joins a course in Russian, where she meets Ivan, a 21-year-old Hungarian mathematics student.
She finds herself drawn to him, and they commence an epistolary relationship. The first part of the novel is basically the two of them emailing each other, interspersed with Selin’s doings and musings while she awaits the next email.
Though obsessed with Ivan, Selin is anxious not to be the kind of girl for whom love and boyfriend become the source of life’s meaning. This anxiety, understandably, doesn’t aid her fledgling romance with Ivan. Rather, it complicates it beyond comprehension, not just for her but for him too.
Hungarian summer
Like Batuman, Selin is interested in the mysteries of language, the mechanics of communication, and the question of whether we think differently in different languages. She is constantly in situations where she is either struggling to understand or make herself understood, and one reason this keeps happening is that she is either taking or giving language lessons.
In the second half of the novel, Selin spends a summer teaching English in a Hungarian village. In her head, she decided to go to Hungary because it is Ivan’s country, and she hoped to spend more time with him.
But she finds that her days in Hungary, instead of bringing her closer to Ivan, were more like War and Peace : “new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book.”
Quirky comparisons between life situations and Russian novels are one of the standard delights of The Idiot , which is named after Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name. Not only does Batuman acknowledge Dostoyevsky at the end of the book (“what writer could ever touch the hem of your lofty garment?”), her only other book, on reading Russian literature, is also named after a Dostoevsky novel, The Possessed .
So with The Idiot , there is never any doubt that you are reading a novel by a literature junkie with a marked preference for Russian stuff. If you are, or were, a student of literature who has spent many nights in other people’s hostel rooms debating existentialism, Proust, and Tolstoy till six in the morning, then carried on the discussion over breakfast, and eventually dozed off during the morning lecture on Tolstoy, Proust and existentialism, then The Idiot will give you paroxysms of nostalgia.
But even if you had studied commerce or management in college, it would still speak to you, or at least to the idiot in you, whom you locked up and put away around the same time that you grew up and became, like your phone, smart.
The Idiot; Elif Batuman; Jonathan Cape; ₹599
