Missing are the highly competitive egos and fraternal orders ivy leagues are known for. It offers an attractive antidote to our expectations for what a Harvard freshman’s bildungsroman might be. “Part of this comes from being children of immigrants,” said Batuman, “and being so conscious of not having a script for what is normal and not normal.In a relatively short time, much has been written about Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot, published earlier this year. Becoming a writer is being open to everything.” “She thinks, oh, this is part of becoming a writer. “Selin is having dinner with these people,” said Batuman. She stays in a house where the husband puts a stuffed weasel in her room. An abrasive German teacher takes Selin home for a jarring dinner with her family, whose members proceed to bicker. Selin goes to Hungary on a badly designed teaching program. I’m an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I’m most interested in exploring are the ones I’ve experienced personally.” I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. “I’m Turkish-American, I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. “This book is based on my experiences,” she said.

“In a way, it’s less pessimistic, if you were a person who didn’t see all these happy endings everywhere and felt that there was something wrong with you, that you couldn’t get with the program.”įor fictional material, Batuman doesn’t stray far from her own history. “There is a way of working at narrative in Russian literature that was true to me, that was more painful and pessimistic than American literature,” she said. That darkness would appeal to an adolescent Batuman. “There is something about the story not being over when you think it’s going to be over, and not necessarily ending on a note you think it’s going to end on.”Īfter 400 years of murderous czars, the penal colonies of Stalin, the horrors of World War II and now the opposition-crushing autocracy of Vladimir Putin, Russian literature tends to be stripped of the nostalgia and optimism often found in American novels. Batuman’s obsession with Russian literature started when she read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in high school in New Jersey, where she was raised by her parents, who were both Turkish-born medical-school professors.

The idiot book elif