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The Idiot

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The Idiot

By: Elif Batuman
Narrated by: Elif Batuman
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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, Ltd Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

What listeners say about The Idiot

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Profile Image for Kristina Row

how clever the main character was but also very awkward.

It was a hard read but worth sticking with. it's a good book which took some effort to finish.

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Profile Image for Lic

Terrible performance

The reading of this was painful! So slow and disengaging. It was by far the worst audio book I have heard.

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.

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