Review: The Idiot

The Idiot by Elif Batuman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book… I don’t know.

I remember that book Prep from 13 or so years ago, and this book has a very similar conceit and setup. In this one, a clearly bright college student falls a bit for an upperclassman and ends up following him for a semester overseas. She’s definitely in over her head a bit in pretty much everything, and the book chronicles those results.

I struggled with it largely because I couldn’t tell, exactly, whether we were supposed to feel pity for the protagonist, whether we were laughing at her, or whether it was something else entirely. The whole disconnect there made it pretty awkward on a whole, and I almost feel like I may be the idiot in that I didn’t quite follow the point. Or maybe that was the point.

Still, not the most compelling read as of late. I can’t really recommend as much as I’d like to.

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