The Idiot
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Narrated by:
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Elif Batuman
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By:
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Elif Batuman
About this listen
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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, and The Millions.
©2017 Elif Batuman (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
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“Masterly funny debut novel...Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” (Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair)
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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To See the Moon Again
- By: Jamie Langston Turner
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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If I Forget You
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Christopher Greene
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-one years after they were driven apart by circumstances beyond their control, two former lovers have a chance encounter on a Manhattan street. What follows is a tense, suspenseful exploration of the many facets of enduring love. Told from alternating points of view through time, If I Forget You tells the story of Henry Gold, a poet whose rise from poverty embodies the American dream, and Margot Fuller, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and their unlikely, star-crossed love affair.
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Good, but not great.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-01-16
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Conversations with Friends
- A Novel
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa's world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick.
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Interesting point of view; glad I listened!
- By Amazon Customer on 08-23-17
By: Sally Rooney
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The Visiting Privilege
- New and Collected Stories
- By: Joy Williams
- Narrated by: Richard Powers, Emily Woo Zeller, Elisabeth Rodgers, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: 33 stories drawn from three much-lauded collections and another 13 appearing here for the first time in book form.
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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God-Shaped Hole
- A Novel
- By: Tiffanie DeBartolo
- Narrated by: Rachael Warren
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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When Beatrice Trixie Jordan replies to a personal ad, she meets Jacob Grace, a charming, effervescent 30-something free-spirit writer passionately seeking life. He possesses his own turns of phrase and ways of thinking and feeling that dissonantly harmonize with Trixie's off-center vision. As they rollercoaster through the joys and furies of their wrenching romance, they try to come to terms with the hurt brought about by both of their distant fathers who, in different ways, forsook them.
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To see a fortune teller or not to see one...
- By Renee on 08-08-18
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May We Be Forgiven
- By: A. M. Homes
- Narrated by: Andy Paris
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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May We Be Forgiven, a darkly comic novel of 21st-century domestic life, stars Harold Silver, a historian who's always been jealous of his successful brother, George. But when the hot-tempered George is institutionalized for committing a violent act, Harold finds himself comforting his brother's wife and children. What follows is a scathing examination of a family so fractured it may never be whole again.
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Give this one a try!
- By JWB on 02-13-13
By: A. M. Homes
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Chanel Bonfire
- By: Wendy Lawless
- Narrated by: Wendy Lawless
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time Wendy Lawless turned 17, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.... Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
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Not an Engaging Listen
- By Sobriquet on 03-13-13
By: Wendy Lawless
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The Great Failure
- A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Original Recording
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"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.
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If you have been let down by anyone. Listen
- By Mia on 04-19-18
By: Natalie Goldberg
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The Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mitchell Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school....
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Anything for success
- By JillHen on 09-13-15
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By: Kim Wright
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Che Milan's life is falling apart. Not only has her longtime lover abruptly dumped her, but her eccentric, demanding mother has recently died. When an urn of ashes arrives along with a note reminding Che of a half-forgotten promise to take her mother to Canterbury, Che finds herself reluctantly undertaking a pilgrimage. Within days she joins a group of women who are walking the 60 miles from London to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By Melissa on 09-22-19
By: Kim Wright
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The Idiot
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After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The 26-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people”. Even before he reaches home, he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg, the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation.
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I should've learned my lesson
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Young Prince Mishkin is that rare thing - a "completely beautiful human being". He is honest, humble, generous, and selfless, but unfortunately these traits mean he is often mistaken for an idiot. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, after being away at a Swiss sanatorium for the treatment of epilepsy, Prince Mishkin is taken under the wing of the wife of General Yepanchin, who arranges for him to live with the family of her money-obsessed friend Ganya.
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wow.
- By Michal Krawczyk on 04-25-17
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The Idiot
- By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Prince Myshkin has just returned to Russia after several years in a Swiss sanitarium and soon finds himself in a complicated love triangle. Myshkin's honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. This new abridgement was completed exclusively for Mission Books by Russian Studies scholar Thomas Beyer to keep the important religious themes of the novel intact.
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Simon Vance ruins his own near perfect narration.
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-17
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Topics of Conversation
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- Unabridged
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Miranda Popkey's first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt - written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women - the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage - and careens through 20 years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life.
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Conversation Item
- By gian balsamo on 01-13-20
By: Miranda Popkey
What listeners say about The Idiot
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- R. ISSEM
- 12-22-22
Journal entries
I enjoyed this in the same way I “enjoyed” Karl Ove Knaussgard’s My Struggle volumes. People are fascinating even if they are smart & boring. The protagonist of this story is very young, very immature and unformed which spoke to me in a specific way. I love Russian literature which I feel she attempted to imitate but failed due to lack of experience and human connection. I will read more of her works, even though I found this rather dull.
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- Roumiana Gold
- 01-21-21
Loved it ❤️❤️❤️
I didn’t know what the book was about and I was going on long walks listening to it. The writing is aloof, which I love! It’s kind of separated from the feelings. Gives you breathing space to figure out what’s going on. She talks about being a student at Harvard, her classes, volunteering and eventually falling for a boy and her internal struggle. She cracks open the door to the colorful and bizarre world of an introvert. There’s always something happening around her. And there’s a certain peace and quiet to her voice (both the literary and the reading voice). That peaceful, vulnerable voice is both entertaining for the content, but relaxing. I have another hour of listening left and I’m already dreading that it will end.
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1 person found this helpful
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- patrick morris
- 01-13-18
Compelling and affecting 'voice'
Loved this, found myself thinking and talking like the narrator even tho little plot, just a year in the life of a very observant, smart fish out of water 19yo
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- BCB
- 09-24-22
So good.
Insightful, funny, tender and beautifully read by the author. This audiobook is a very special experience. Not to be missed.
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- MDG
- 07-29-22
Idiot
Some authors should allow others to do their audiobooks. This is one of them. I was an Idiot for using a credit on this audio. Maybe if I read the book, I will enjoy it better. Leave the reading of books to professionals. The monotonous voice did not allow me to finish the book. After Chapter 12, I had to give up!
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- Halit Pinar, MD
- 02-27-23
A rare gem!
Great book and narration. One of the rare examples of literature by the Turkish diaspora.
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- Joon Yang
- 06-19-24
A humor hard not to love
The perspective and writing are refreshing and compelling. Young romance seen and written from this perspective feels terribly difficult to make genuine and Batuman does just that.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-21-17
Fascinating point of view
The author's voice and experiences are interestingly objective - intelligent, restrained and artifice- free. If you require a plot-driven story, this isn't the one for you. If, though, you'd like to get out of your head and into the author's, then dive on in!
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20 people found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Ian Jobling
- 05-19-17
Captures the strangeness of being
This account of a young woman's first year at Harvard and summer trip to Hungary captures the random directionlessness of life and of the mind and also the human foreignness to language. Batuman captures the feeling that words are incapable of describing our experience and that no one even begins to understand this problem. If you're looking for the kind of "twisty plot" that is so common these days, you will be disappointed. But if you are ready for a new dimension of existence to be revealed to you, this is the book.
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16 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Montse
- 07-08-19
From nowhere to nowhere
I was unsure about this book, but unlike some reviewers, I have enjoyed the sweet voice of the author: it sounds as if it were her inner voice reading out her thoughts to you, trying not to sway your opinion one way or another.
However, I rated it with three stars, as I was expecting more of a story or a plot. I grabbed the author's hand, and walked with her for many months, countries, people, through great awkwardness... up to nowhere.
I had been building expectations, but there was nothing in the end, the same kind of hollow sensation that impregnated everything else.
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