{"product_id":"the-idiot-isbn-9780143111061","title":"The Idiot","description":"\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • \u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book \u003cb\u003e• \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eNominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eGQ\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Masterly funny debut novel . .  . Erudite but never pretentious, \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —\u003cb\u003eSloane Crosley, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNamed one the best books of the year by Refinery29 \u003ci\u003e• \u003c\/i\u003eMashable One \u003ci\u003e• Elle Magazine • The New York Times • \u003c\/i\u003eBookpage \u003ci\u003e• Vogue • NPR • \u003c\/i\u003eBuzzfeed \u003ci\u003e•\u003c\/i\u003eThe Millions\u003c\/b\u003e“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eGQ\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Masterly funny debut novel . .  . Erudite but never pretentious, \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —\u003cb\u003eSloane Crosley, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eVanity Fair \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . .  Batuman’s writing is funny and deadpan, and Selin’s observations tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship, social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will quietly amuse and provoke thought.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHuffington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is a sentimental education, it’s one leavened by a great deal of mordant and delightful humor. . . . At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e’ is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is an impressive debut with a ridiculous amount of charm and a protagonist so relatable she’s almost impossible to forget.” \u003cb\u003e—A.V. Club\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection \u003ci\u003eThe Possessed \u003c\/i\u003e(2010), has brave and original ideas about what a 'novel' might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language . . . . It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone who’s successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her protagonist’s intellectual vertigo with maturity and common sense.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSlate\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Beautifully written first novel . . . Batuman, a staff writer for the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker,\u003c\/i\u003e has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to sketching character . . . The novel fairly brims with provocative ideas about language, literature and culture.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Associated Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A vibrant novel of ideas . . . Like her essays, Batuman’s \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection \u003ci\u003eThe Possessed\u003c\/i\u003e, Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st century’s great love letters to reading . . . It was a tour de force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary obsession . . . A different—though no less tenuous—variety of possession is explored in \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e, Batuman’s first novel . . . The book’s pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent, she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely observed world . . . Selin’s is a consciousness one does not want to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend. 'I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time,' she writes, 'the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that \u003ci\u003ethat\u003c\/i\u003e was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.' Batuman articulates those little moments—of revelation and of emptiness—as well as anyone writing today. The book’s legacy seems destined to be one of observation, not character—though when the observer is this gifted, is that really any wonder?” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLA Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No one writes funnier or more stylishly about higher education. Nothing written about grad school is as entertaining as her 2010 collection of dispatches from Stanford's comparative-literature department, The Possessed, and her studied satire of Harvard in The Idiot is nearly its equal.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eVillage Voice\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Batuman’s sardonic wit makes for a delectable unfolding of Selin’s experience of love, life and language.” —\u003cb\u003eBBC.com \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Batuman’s novel is roaringly funny. It is also intellectually subtle, surprising, and enlightening. It is a book fueled by deadpan wonder.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Charming, hilarious and wise debut novel . . . Batuman titled the book \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e (after Dostoevsky’s famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor, silly idiot, she seems to be saying. \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e, a novel of innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude that Dag Hammarskjöld expressed in his memoir \u003ci\u003eMarkings\u003c\/i\u003e, 'For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!'” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDallas News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is half \u003ci\u003eThe Education of Henry Adams\u003c\/i\u003e and half \u003ci\u003eInnocents Abroad\u003c\/i\u003e. Twain would have savored Selin's first international trip to Paris, Hungary and Turkey . . . Our first footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be missed.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eShelf Awareness\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Selin is entrancing—so smart, so clueless, so funny—and Batuman’s exceptional discernment,\u003cbr\u003e comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a self.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wonderful first novel . . . Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible ‘to be sincere without sounding pretentious,’ and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review) \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. Readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003e(starred) \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years.” \u003cb\u003e—Mary Karr, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Art of Memoir\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLit\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Liars’ Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m not Turkish, I don’t have a Serbian best friend, I’m not in love with a Hungarian, I don’t go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.” \u003cb\u003e—Miranda July, author of \u003ci\u003eThe First Bad Man\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eIt Chooses You \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Elif Batuman’s novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.” \u003cb\u003e—Joseph O’Neill, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Dog\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNetherland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman\u003c\/i\u003e: one more fascinated with what’s going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what’s going on inside her.” \u003cb\u003e—Sheila Heti, author of \u003ci\u003eHow Should a Person Be? \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eTicknor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eElif Batuman\u003c\/b\u003e has been a staff writer at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e since 2010. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them\u003c\/i\u003e. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a \u003ci\u003eParis Review\u003c\/i\u003e Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.Fall \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would “have” it. “You’ll be so fancy,” said my mother’s sister, who had married a computer scientist, “sending your e . . . mails.” She emphasized the “e” and paused before “mail.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. “Things are changing so fast,” my father said. “Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir.” Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been “in” Ankara that day, so I didn’t really pay attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The “address” had my last name in it—Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish \u003ci\u003eğ\u003c\/i\u003e, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent \u003ci\u003eg\u003c\/i\u003e was funny. “The \u003ci\u003eg\u003c\/i\u003e is silent,” I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn’t understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You plug it into the wall,” said the girl behind the table. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInsofar as I’d had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with “Dear” and “Sincerely”; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, register for student loans. They showed you a video about a recent college graduate who broke his leg and defaulted on his student loans, proving that the budget he drew up was no good: a good budget makes provisions for debilitating injury. The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn’t include “ratatouille” or “Tasmanian devil.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the staircase approaching my room, I could hear tuneless singing and the slap of plastic slippers. My new roommate, Hannah, was standing on a chair, taping a sign that read Hannah Park’s Desk over her desk, chanting monotonously along with Blues Traveler on her Discman. When I came in, she turned in a pantomime of ­surprise, pitching to and fro, then jumped noisily to the floor and took off her headphones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Have you considered mime as a career?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eMime?\u003c\/i\u003e No, my dear, I’m afraid my parents sent me to Harvard to become a surgeon, not a mime.” She blew her nose loudly. “Hey—\u003ci\u003emy \u003c\/i\u003ebank didn’t give me a dictionary!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It doesn’t have ‘Tasmanian devil,’ ” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe took the dictionary from my hands, rifling the pages. “It has plenty of words.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI told her she could have it. She put it on the shelf next to the dictionary she had gotten in high school, for being the valedictorian. “They look good together,” she said. I asked if her other dictionary had “Tasmanian devil.” It didn’t. “Isn’t the Tasmanian devil a cartoon character?” she asked, looking suspicious. I showed her the page in my other dictionary that had not just “Tasmanian devil,” but also “Tasmanian wolf,” with a picture of the wolf glancing, a bit sadly, over its left shoulder.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah stood very close to me and stared at the page. Then she looked right and left and whispered hotly in my ear, “That music has been playing all day long.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What music?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Shhh—stand absolutely still.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe stood absolutely still. Faint romantic strings drifted from under the door of our other roommate, Angela.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s the sound track for \u003ci\u003eThe Last of the Mohicans\u003c\/i\u003e,” whispered Hannah. “She’s been playing it all morning, since I got up. She’s just been sitting in there with the door shut, playing the tape over and over again. I knocked and asked her to turn it down but you can still hear it. I had to listen to my Discman to drown her out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s not that loud,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“But it’s just weird that she sits\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethere like that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAngela had gotten to our three-person, two-bedroom suite at seven the previous morning and taken the single bedroom, leaving Hannah and me to share the one with bunk beds. When I got there in the evening, I found Hannah storming around in a fury, moving furniture, sneezing, and shouting about Angela. “I never even saw her!” Hannah yelled from under her desk. She suddenly succeeded in detaching two things she had been pulling at, and banged her head. “OWW!” she yelled. She crawled out and pointed wrathfully at Angela’s desk. “These books? They’re fake!” She seized what looked like a stack of four leather-bound volumes, one with \u003ci\u003eThe Holy Bible\u003c\/i\u003e printed on the spine, shook it under my nose, and slammed it down again. It was a wooden box. “What’s even in there?” She knocked on the Bible. “Her last testament?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hannah, please be gentle with other people’s property,” said a soft voice, and I noticed two small Koreans, evidently Hannah’s parents, sitting in the window seat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAngela came in. She had a sweet expression and was black, and was wearing a Harvard windbreaker and a Harvard backpack. Hannah immediately confronted her about the single room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hmm, yeah,” Angela said. “It’s just I got here really early and I had so many suitcases.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I kind of noticed the suitcases,” said Hannah. She flung open the door to Angela’s room. A yellowed cloth and a garland of cloth roses had been draped over the one tiny window, and in the murk stood four or five human-sized suitcases.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI said maybe we could each have the single room for a third of the year, with Angela going first. Angela’s mother came in, dragging another suitcase. She stood in the doorway to Angela’s room. Her body filled the entire doorway. “It is what it is,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah’s father stood up and took out a camera. “First college roommates! That’s an important relationship!” he said. He took several pictures of Hannah and me but none of Angela.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah bought a refrigerator for the common room. She said I could use it if I bought something for the room, too, like a poster. I asked what kind of poster she had in mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Psychedelic,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI didn’t know what a psychedelic poster was, so she showed me her psychedelic notebook. It had a fluorescent tie-dyed spiral, with purple lizards walking around the spiral and disappearing into the center.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What if they don’t have that?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Then a photograph of Albert Einstein,” she said decisively, as if it were the obvious next choice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Albert Einstein?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Yeah, one of those black-and-white pictures. You know: Einstein.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe campus bookstore turned out to have a huge selection of Albert Einstein posters. There was Einstein at a blackboard, Einstein in a car, Einstein sticking out his tongue, Einstein smoking a pipe. I didn’t totally understand why we had to have an image of Einstein on the wall. But it was better than buying my own refrig­erator.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poster I got was no better or worse than the other Einstein posters in any way that I could see, but Hannah seemed to dislike it. “Hmm,” she said. “I think it’ll look good there.” She pointed to the space over my bookshelf.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“But then \u003ci\u003eyou\u003c\/i\u003e can’t see it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That’s okay. It goes best there.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom that day on, everyone who happened by our room—­neighbors wanting to borrow stuff, residential computer staff, student council candidates, all kinds of people to whom my small enthusiasms should have been a source of little or no concern—went out of their way to disabuse me of my great admiration for Albert Einstein. Einstein had invented the atomic bomb, abused dogs, neglected his children. “There were many greater geniuses than Einstein,” said a guy from down the hall, who had stopped by to borrow\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003emy copy of Dostoevsky’s \u003ci\u003eThe Double\u003c\/i\u003e. “Alfred Nobel hated mathematics and didn’t give the Nobel Prize to any mathematicians. There were many who were more deserving.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Oh.” I handed him the book. “Well, see you around.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Thanks,” he said, glaring at the poster. “This is the man who beats his wife, forces her to solve his mathematical problems, to do the dirty work, and he denies her credit. And you put his picture on your wall.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Listen, leave me out of this,” I said. “It’s not really my poster. It’s a complicated situation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe wasn’t listening. “Einstein in this country is synonymous with genius, while many greater geniuses aren’t famous at all. Why is this? I am asking you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI sighed. “Maybe it’s because he’s really the best, and even jealous mudslingers can’t hide his star quality,” I said. “Nietzsche would say that such a great genius is \u003ci\u003eentitled \u003c\/i\u003eto beat his wife.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat shut him up. After he left, I thought about taking down the poster. I wanted to be a courageous person, uncowed by other people’s dumb opinions. But what was the dumb opinion: thinking Einstein was so great, or thinking he was the worst? In the end, I left the poster up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah snored. Everything in the room that wasn’t a solid block of wood—the windowpanes, the bed girders, the mattress springs, my rib cage—vibrated in sympathy. It did no good to wake her up or roll her over. She just started again a minute later. If she was asleep, I was by definition awake, and vice versa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI convinced Hannah that she had obstructive sleep apnea, which was depriving her brain cells of oxygen and compromising her chances of getting into a top-ten medical school. She went to the campus health center and came back with a box of adhesive strips that were supposed to prevent snoring by sticking to your nose. A photograph on the box showed a man and a woman gazing into the distance, wearing matching plastic nose strips, a breeze ruffling the woman’s hair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah pulled her nose up from the side, and I smoothed the strip in place with my thumbs. Her face felt so small and doll-like that I felt a wave of tenderness toward her. Then she started yelling about something, and the feeling passed. The nose strips actually worked, but they gave Hannah sinus headaches, so she stopped using them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the long days that stretched between even longer nights, I stumbled from room to room taking placement tests. You had to sit in a basement writing essays about whether it was better to be a Renaissance person or a specialist. There was a quantitative reasoning test full of melancholy word problems—“The graph models the hypothetical mass in grams of a broiler chicken up to eighty weeks of age”—and every evening was some big meeting where you sat on the floor and learned that you were now a little fish in a big sea, and were urged to view this circumstance as an exhilarating challenge rather than a source of anxiety. I tried not to give too much weight to the thing about the fish, but after a while it started to get me down anyway. It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy academic adviser, Carol, had a British accent and worked at the Office of Information Technologies. Twenty years ago, in the 1970s, she had received a master’s degree from Harvard in Old Norse. I knew that the Office of Information Technologies was where you mailed your telephone bill each month. Other than that, its sphere of activity was mysterious. How was Old Norse involved? On the subject of her work, Carol said only, “I wear many hats.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHannah and I both caught a terrible cold. We took turns buying cold medicine and knocked it back like shots from the little plastic cup.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen it came time to choose classes, everyone said it was of utmost importance to apply to freshman seminars, because otherwise it could be years before you had a chance to work with senior faculty. I applied to three literature seminars and got called in for one interview. I reported to the top floor of a cold white building, where I shivered for twenty minutes on a leather sofa under a skylight wondering if I was in the right place. There were some strange newspapers on the coffee table. That was the first time I saw the \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary ­Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e. I couldn’t understand anything in the \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA door opened and the professor called me in. He extended his hand—an enormous hand on an incredibly skinny, pale wrist, further dwarfed by a gigantic overcoat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t think I should shake your hand,” I said. “I have this cold.” Then I had a violent fit of sneezing. The professor looked startled, but recovered quickly. “Gesundheit,” he said urbanely. “I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. These first days of college can be rough on the immune system.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“So I’m learning,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Learning! Ha, ha.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ha, ha,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, let’s get down to business. From your application, you seem to be very creative. I enjoyed your creative application essay. My only concern is that you realize this seminar is an academic class, not a creative class.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Right,” I said, nodding energetically and trying to determine whether any of the rectangles in my peripheral vision was a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they were all books. The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300900065509,"sku":"NP9780143111061","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143111061.jpg?v=1767739902","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-idiot-isbn-9780143111061","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}