What The Idiot teaches us about the failures of language

Reflections on Elif Batuman's brilliant mess of a novel

Old Slavonic grammar
(Image credit: iStock/rootstocks)

Elif Batuman's novel The Idiot superficially reads as a bright undergraduate's intellectual autobiography about her first love. But really, it's about the ways language structures and distorts the way we think, feel, and relate.

This is the story of Selin, a precocious Turkish-American student at Harvard who thinks she wants to study linguistics. While studying Russian, she strikes up an email correspondence with Ivan, a classmate majoring in math whom she spends most of the novel thinking about, even following him to Hungary under the auspices of volunteer work. If this were just the love story, it would be a perplexing and deeply unsatisfying read. That's partly the point: Selin and Ivan, both of whom turn out to be formal experimentalists, start off by partially re-enacting the dull adventures of "Nina" and "Ivan" as set out in their Russian text for beginners titled Nina in Siberia — most of which consists of Nina looking for Ivan, who disappeared and turns out to have married someone else. Their jousts deepen into a sparring match that revolves around the ways language doesn't quite work. Take this exchange, in which Selin tries to explain Thoreau's commitment to living simply:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.