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Chargement... The Idiot (édition 2018)par Batuman Elif (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Idiot par Elif Batuman
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. (4.5 stars) This book really took me on a journey. I loved how much I got to know Selin and honestly it was so funny. I really enjoyed her dry sense of humor. It would have been 5 stars, but I just did not get the romance aspect, sorry. ( ) I was rather charmed by ‘The Idiot’, although I didn’t find it as hilarious as [b:The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them|6763627|The Possessed Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them|Elif Batuman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441764218s/6763627.jpg|6961467]. Batuman’s narrator Selin remains somewhat elusive, despite having a distinctive voice. I liked the sense that she was uncertain of herself and discovering who she was; a realistic situation for a first year undergraduate student. However, I did wonder whether the meandering and anecdotal style could be sustained for 400 pages. Although my interest was kept, once I got to the end of the book the whole thing seemed to dissolve in my head. There’s something insubstantial about it, despite moments of great insight and amusement. This is definitely a matter of taste, of course. Batuman’s writing is great, especially her meditations on the nature of language, but her non-fiction is simply more to my liking. I found Selin’s crush on Ivan rather tiresome, because Ivan is rather tiresome. While this is probably also realistic, it took up a lot of space and dragged a bit. Selin’s relationship with her friend Svetlana was much more interesting. This scene with Selin, Svetlana, and Svetlana’s mother was priceless: She turned to me abruptly. “Do you wax your eyebrows? Surely you must pluck them, with tweezers. No? They have such an interesting shape. It doesn’t look quite natural. Of course, you don’t need to do anything with your eyebrows. Well, maybe you could just clean them up a little bit, right here, but it’s not a crisis. Not like Svetlana, who won’t do anything with hers, and they make her look so angry.” In part 'The Idiot' was a victim of high expectations. If I hadn’t already read anything by Batuman I might have given it four stars. Capricious as it seems, I can only award three when my expectations were high and it was somehow too wispy to meet them. best "coming of age" (not that i would specifically put it in that category) type story i've ever read. it's an actual coming of age story, one that, while slightly unrealistic for the sake of entertainment, is not just believable, but also relatable, hilarious, and real. the writing blends together seamlessly, and while towards the middle of the book i believed it should be shorter, i would now refuse to sacrifice a single word. It's the mid 1990s and Selin is in her freshman year at Harvard. Email is new, cell phones aren't around yet, and Selin is navigating the transition to adulthood. She's learning to interact with her peers and learning all the different ways people interact with each other and the world. And, of course, what story about young adults could avoid a love interest? I loved the opening of this book. Selin's voice is funny and the mid-90s college setting is my era. But, reading this on my kindle, I found myself checking how close I was to the end after 16% of the book was read. Hmm. I don't think Batuman really sustained the freshness that she achieves in the opening of the novel. I kept reading and moderately enjoyed it, but I got annoyed with the love interest and thought things just got a little too out-there for me. OK, but not as special as I was hoping it would be.
The sermonic version of The Idiot might conclude with this: if power compromises love, and sex involves power, then sex always compromises love. To be intoxicated by someone’s power is to allow your love for them to be compromised. True love will not save you: the truer the love the deeper the compromise. I don’t think Selin sees a way out of this predicament. In one respect, The Idiot, a debut novel by Elif Batuman, staff writer at the New Yorker, is an expansion of the Hungary-based segment of her nonfiction The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Ironically, however, it strikes you as throwaway material that didn’t merit inclusion in that well-received work. It’s mostly bland and boring. At over 400 pages, it also feels interminable...Ultimately, you cannot but wonder why Batuman wrote such a meandering and listless novel. Because it reflects her real-life experiences? If so, the author would do well to emulate a minor character in The Idiot, who, unlike Selin and a friend of hers, “doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. Elif Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” is in part about the unlikely and consuming crush that Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, develops on an older mathematics student from Hungary during her freshman year at Harvard. It is unclear, for hundreds of pages, whether this crush is requited. Meanwhile the reader, palm crushed into forehead, thinks, “Poor Selin, what are you doing to yourself?”..Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. “The Idiot” builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast... After 100 pages, I was done with Ivan and wanted Selin to be done, too....There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogol’s...this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one. Fiction, like love, is strange. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot...A summary of this kind makes the novel sound like a treatise, which is exactly what it is not. The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selin’s friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice. Elif Batuman interview: ‘I thought racism and sexism were over. I was in for a rude awakening’ Read more The likability tends to be confined to the female characters, however...A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s Appartient à la sérieSelin Karadag (1) Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction Easily the funniest book Ive read this year. GQ Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman. Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. 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 beautyand has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 Mashable One Elle Magazine The New York Times Bookpage Vogue NPR Buzzfeed The Millions. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populairesGenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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