The Idiot-白痴

作者：Elif Batuman

书名：The Idiot《白痴》

中文简介：The Idiot《白痴》是一部半自传体的2017年土耳其裔美国作家伊利夫巴图曼的小说。这是一部成长小说，与上世纪90年代就读于哈佛大学的塞林大学新生有关。Karada是哈佛大学学习语言学的新生。她在一个俄语班上遇到了一个匈牙利数学系的大学生伊万，两人通过电子邮件开始通信，偶尔也会在一起。虽然塞林和伊万有时似乎对彼此的爱情感兴趣，但他们不知道如何和何时表达自己的感情。

英文简介：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. 
 
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.

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. The Idiot 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.