![]() ![]() The narrator’s name is Selin, Turkish for “the flood.”īatuman has an enviable eye and ear for fertile weirdness, for those details that make the world interesting and moving but, tantalizingly, never determinately meaningful. ![]() ![]() Shortly thereafter, the love interest disappears to a math conference in Thailand. According to both books, “sixteen-wheel trucks glided by on barges.” Trucks aren’t allowed on Budapest’s streets on Sundays. “Nothing in my life experience or education had prepared me to judge such a contest.” Both narrators also canoe with the Hungarian love interest down the Danube from the outskirts to the center of Budapest. The narrators go to Hungary anyway, where at a summer camp they’re each asked to judge “an adolescent boys’ leg contest.” “I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten,” Batuman writes, with a few words’ variation, in both books. In the novel, as in the essay, a Turkish-American Harvard freshman falls in love with a Hungarian classmate who secures the narrator-protagonist a summer gig teaching English in Hungary so she can visit him in Budapest but in both tellings this Hungarian classmate has been concealing a girlfriend he has no intention of leaving. Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot can be described as a 432-page expansion of five pages from her first book, a nonfiction collection called The Possessed. ![]()
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