La idiota / The Idiot

Elif Batuman

La idiota / The Idiot
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
Country
Spain
Published
22 October 2019
Pages
480
ISBN
9788439735854

La idiota / The Idiot

Elif Batuman

El debut novelistico nominado al Pulitzer sobre el gran desafio que supone llegar a la edad adulta.

Esta historia empieza en el ano 1995, cuando el e-mail era algo nuevo y emocionante. La protagonista es Selin, hija de inmigrantes turcos apasionada por la literatura que acaba de llegar a Harvard decidida a convertirse en escritora. Acostumbrada a vivir a traves de los libros, llega a la universidad sin manual de instrucciones: ?como se hacen amigos? ?Como se enamora uno? ?Importan mas las cosas cuando se viven que cuando se leen? Selin ve su vida como una narracion mas pero, ?que pasa cuando intentamos anadir otras personas a nuestra historia?

Asi empieza su relacion con Ivan, un estudiante hungaro de matematicas algo mayor que ella con quien comenzara a escribirse. Mediante el correo electronico, crearan un mundo paralelo habitable (o una barrera de ficcion tras la que esconderse) que rapidamente eclipsara todas sus otras relaciones.

Durante los doce meses que cubre esta novela de iniciacion, la heroina de Batuman hace uso de un ingenio y una mordacidad entranables para descubrirse y, sobre todo, inventarse ante el desafio que supone llegar a la edad adulta. Este debut nominado al Pulitzer es una reflexion perdurable sobre la relacion entre el arte y la vida; las palabras y el mundo real; las historias que nos contamos y las narrativas en las que queremos encajar.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down. -Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You

Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year. -GQ

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 beauty–and 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

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