La Idiota / The Idiot, Paperback

El debut novel stico nominado al Pulitzer sobre el gran desaf o que supone llegar a la edad adulta.

Esta historia empieza en el a o 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 trav s de los libros, llega a la universidad sin manual de instrucciones: c mo se hacen amigos? C mo se enamora uno? Importan m s las cosas cuando se viven que cuando se leen? Selin ve su vida como una narraci n m s pero, qu pasa cuando intentamos a adir otras personas a nuestra historia?

As empieza su relaci n con Ivan, un estudiante h ngaro de matem ticas algo mayor que ella con quien comenzar a escribirse. Mediante el correo electr nico, crear n un mundo paralelo habitable (o una barrera de ficci n tras la que esconderse) que r pidamente eclipsar todas sus otras relaciones.

Durante los doce meses que cubre esta novela de iniciaci n, la hero na de Batuman hace uso de un ingenio y una mordacidad entra ables para descubrirse y, sobre todo, inventarse ante el desaf o que supone llegar a la edad adulta. Este debut nominado al Pulitzer es una reflexi n perdurable sobre la relaci n 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

Elif Batuman (Nueva York, 1977) es escritora, acad mica y periodista en The New Yorker. Su primer libro, Los pose dos, una colecci n de ensayos sobre Rusia, fue finalista del National Book Critics Circle Award.