
The Idiot
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Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Elif Batuman
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By:
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Elif Batuman
About this listen
It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is determined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class. She spends the summer in the Hungarian countryside teaching English to village children, where sad and comic misunderstandings ensue. Full of the razor-sharp evocations of character and place that have long delighted listeners, The Idiot tackles literary ambition, female friendship, the American dream, Chomskian linguistics, the Russian novel and romantic love.
©2017 Elif Batuman (P)2017 Audible, Ltdhow clever the main character was but also very awkward.
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The book was pretty slow and hard to keep engaged. There were partial funny moments, but definitely wasn’t conveyed by the performance. The plot wasn’t great and didn’t leave me wanting more.
Terrible performance
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