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Cargando... The Idiot: A Novel (edición 2018)por Elif Batuman (Autor)
Información de la obraThe Idiot por Elif Batuman
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. It's the mid 1990s and Selin is in her freshman year at Harvard. Email is new, cell phones aren't around yet, and Selin is navigating the transition to adulthood. She's learning to interact with her peers and learning all the different ways people interact with each other and the world. And, of course, what story about young adults could avoid a love interest? I loved the opening of this book. Selin's voice is funny and the mid-90s college setting is my era. But, reading this on my kindle, I found myself checking how close I was to the end after 16% of the book was read. Hmm. I don't think Batuman really sustained the freshness that she achieves in the opening of the novel. I kept reading and moderately enjoyed it, but I got annoyed with the love interest and thought things just got a little too out-there for me. OK, but not as special as I was hoping it would be. i liked this book, but i wish i could've taken more time with it - i had to really rush because it was on hold at the library, so i couldn't renew. i thought this was very clever etc but it also made me pretty sad. the idea is that we're all supposed to cherish the naivety of youth, because as we grow older we lose the capacity to be so stupid and so embarrassing - and it just made me miserable that there are not as many stories about adults going on these journeys of self-discovery, when actually, frankly, many people in their 20s and 30s and beyond are still very stupid. i shouldn't have to read about an 18/19 year old to find themes like the shock of first love... idk. maybe i'm just going through something but this hit me from a weird angle. i wanted to love it but i only liked it, and mostly on an intellectual level. nevertheless it is very good
The sermonic version of The Idiot might conclude with this: if power compromises love, and sex involves power, then sex always compromises love. To be intoxicated by someone’s power is to allow your love for them to be compromised. True love will not save you: the truer the love the deeper the compromise. I don’t think Selin sees a way out of this predicament. In one respect, The Idiot, a debut novel by Elif Batuman, staff writer at the New Yorker, is an expansion of the Hungary-based segment of her nonfiction The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Ironically, however, it strikes you as throwaway material that didn’t merit inclusion in that well-received work. It’s mostly bland and boring. At over 400 pages, it also feels interminable...Ultimately, you cannot but wonder why Batuman wrote such a meandering and listless novel. Because it reflects her real-life experiences? If so, the author would do well to emulate a minor character in The Idiot, who, unlike Selin and a friend of hers, “doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. Elif Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” is in part about the unlikely and consuming crush that Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, develops on an older mathematics student from Hungary during her freshman year at Harvard. It is unclear, for hundreds of pages, whether this crush is requited. Meanwhile the reader, palm crushed into forehead, thinks, “Poor Selin, what are you doing to yourself?”..Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. “The Idiot” builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast... After 100 pages, I was done with Ivan and wanted Selin to be done, too....There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogol’s...this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one. Fiction, like love, is strange. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot...A summary of this kind makes the novel sound like a treatise, which is exactly what it is not. The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selin’s friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice. Elif Batuman interview: ‘I thought racism and sexism were over. I was in for a rude awakening’ Read more The likability tends to be confined to the female characters, however...A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s Pertenece a las seriesSelin Karadag (1) PremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Esta historia empieza en el ao 1995, cuando el e-mail era algo nuevo y emocionante. La protagonista es Selin, hija de inmigrantes turcos apasionada por la literatura que acaba de llegar a Harvard decidida a convertirse en escritora. Acostumbrada a vivir a travs de los libros, llega a la universidad sin manual de instrucciones: cmo se hacen amigos? Cmo se enamora uno? Importan ms las cosas cuando se viven que cuando se leen? Selin ve su vida como una narracin ms pero, qu pasa cuando intentamos aadir otras personas a nuestra historia? As empieza su relacin con Ivan, un estudiante hngaro de matemticas algo mayor que ella con quien comenzar a escribirse. Mediante el correo electrnico, crearn un mundo paralelo habitable (o una barrera de ficcin tras la que esconderse) que rpidamente eclipsar todas sus otras relaciones. Duante el ao que cubre esta novela de iniciacin, la herona de Batuman emplea un ingenio y una mordacidad entraables para descubrirse y, sobre todo, inventarse ante el desafo que supone llegar a la edad adulta. Esta debut nominado al Pulitzer es una reflexin perdurable sobre la relacin entre el arte y la vida, las palabras y el mundo real, las historias que nos contamos y las narrativas en las que quermos encajar. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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One is Svetlana, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, who decides she's going to become Selin's friend and does so with aplomb, quickly becoming the dominant force in Selin's social life. The other is Ivan, a senior from Hungary, who becomes Selin's conversation partner for Russian class, and correspondence partner over the then-new medium of email outside of class in English. Their conversation gradually turns into them spending time together, and Selin develops an intense crush on him. Even after she learns he has a girlfriend (and while he's giving her very mixed signals), she takes up an opportunity to teach English in Hungary over the summer in the hopes of getting to spend time with him.
This book has a very passive central figure. Selin's unsureness about virtually everything means that she mostly reacts to the world around her instead of being proactive. This makes her simultaneously very relatable (who hasn't felt paralyzed with indecision, especially in a new situation?) and quite frustrating. If you've ever lived through the experience of having feelings for someone who wasn't quite sure what they wanted, you find yourself wanting to reach through the pages and shake her by the shoulders while telling her that this isn't going to end well. But you also know there's no way to learn that lesson except living through it, because you probably ignored the person who shook you by the shoulders and tried to warn you off.
Batuman is an incredible writer...I highlighted so many pagges that she wrote that just seemed to perfectly capture the essence of being young and lost and desperately self-conscious. And she creates a very real, sympathetic-even-as-she's-irritating character in Selin. The plot structure, though, could have used some work. While she's at school, the book meanders along slowly and had a hard time holding my interest despite the lovely prose. Once she gets to Hungary, however, and starts interacting with host families and students, the book gets much livelier and there were several moments that were actually laugh-out-loud funny. It's not that I didn't enjoy the portion of the book that takes place at Harvard, but I enjoyed the last quarter-or-so so much more. I wish Batuman had figured out a way to disperse some of that levity more equally throughout the book, because it's like 3/4 a good book and 1/4 a really good book. As is, though, I'd recommend this book, to recent-ish college grads in particular (I feel like if I were too much older than I am now, I'd be too annoyed by Selin to really enjoy what it had to offer). ( )