Idiot – Batumanová Elif (2019)

It's 1995, e-mail is a complete novelty, and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is starting her first year at Harvard. She enrolls in lectures on subjects she has never heard of before, befriends a charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate named Svetlana, and somewhat accidentally begins to correspond with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student in a higher year. Although Selin hardly speaks to Ivan at school, with each e-mail they exchange, it seems as if the act of writing itself holds new and increasingly mysterious meanings. When the school year ends, Ivan heads to Budapest for the summer, and Selin goes to the Hungarian countryside, where she teaches English in a course organized by one of Ivan's friends. On her way to Hungary, she spends two weeks with Svetlana in Paris. However, her summer in Europe is in no way similar to what she has heard about the typical European adventures of other American college students. For Selin, her stay in Europe is a continuation of an introspective journey to herself: she must deal with the joys and confusions of first (unrequited?) love, as well as the growing awareness that she is destined to become a writer. Idiot is a novel about the trials and pleasures of growing up and...