The Idiot
A young woman navigates her first year at Harvard in the 1990s, falling into an ambiguous relationship conducted largely through email.
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In 1995 Selin, a tall Turkish American freshman at Harvard, gets her first email account. In a Russian literature class she meets Ivan, an older Hungarian math student, and the two write long theory-laden messages that follow her into a summer teaching English in rural Hungary.
Multiple novels share this title. The most commonly searched recent book is The Idiot by Elif Batuman (2017), a literary novel about a Harvard freshman in 1995. Fyodor Dostoevsky's earlier The Idiot (1869) is the famous Russian classic.
Elif Batuman wrote a sequel, Either/Or (2022), continuing Selin's college years. The two novels form a connected pair, but The Idiot can be read on its own.
The Idiot is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Idiot takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Idiot is a standalone novel by Elif Batuman, not part of a series.
The Idiot is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.