A review by marjoriehuang
The Idiot by Elif Batuman

5.0

This is about a girls first year at Harvard. She takes a bunch of classes, becomes acquaintances with a bunch of weirdos, and falls for an older math student from her russian class named Ivan. Ivan is horrible and it's not really clear what she likes about him, she just states over and over in the book that she feels painfully attracted to him but there really is no rhyme or reason, IMO. He even somehow convinces her to spend her summer teaching English in the Hungarian villages. The book is pretentious, hilarious, and insanely addicting. I basically stayed up all night to read it. It's packed with literary + film + music references too. Some of the scenes seem to parody weirdly specific stuff that has happened to me before, which was kind of creepy. The two sentences towards the end of the book depicting depression are written so well too, or at least depression the way I've experienced it: the feeling like your face has turned into cake and being unable to eat or even move.

Anyways I'm pleased that I already own the second book, as I'm excited to start it immediately.