The Idiot

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't. It was so hyped up for me – Pulitzer prize finalist, raving reviews in publications I respect, and a pretty solid back-cover description. But hard as I tried, I just couldn't get into it.

Synopsis: a young girl from New Jersey of Turkish heritage arrives at Harvard in the early 90s. She focuses her first year of classes on Russian and linguistics. She meets an older student, the brooding intellectual type, in one of her classes, and quickly becomes entranced by him. They develop a stilted and undefined relationship that meanders through the rest of the novel in a very unsatisfying manner, through the end of the school year to a summer abroad in Paris and weirdly, rural Hungary.

Roxane Gay wrote that it's both easy to read and hard to read, and I agree with that. On the surface, the words themselves are accessible. The dialogue is quite simple. Nothing in the plot is overtly complex. But there are deep intellectual layers that make you think hard (too hard?) about language: its power, its limits, and its capacity for infinite strangeness. Reading this book felt like being in a foreign country where everyone speaks English as their second language; it's easy to understand what everyone is saying, but at the same time, so much feels obscured, absurd, and lost in translation.

I think one could extract a lot of interesting concepts and discussions from this novel, and it did make me think, but I won't be revisiting this book, or this author, anytime soon. Overall, a disappointment.