Elif Batuman‘s The Idiot was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
It’s a contemporary journey over fairly well trodden ground: in a vaguely autobiographical tone, a young person is sent off for their education, they remain wryly detached, fall in love, and travel, all the while wondering–often in quite intelligent ways–about how to navigate the new worlds into which they have stepped.
In this case, the protagonist is a first generation Turkish immigrant, the school is Harvard, and the time is the mid 1990s, at the first edges of the technological revolution. This last bit is important, as the love relationship is mediated, at first, over early versions of e-mail. (The middle bit–Harvard–may be important, depending on your knowledge of and impression of academia in general, and that Boston institution specifically.)
There are some moments of genuine humor, and the main character’s struggle to navigate her first adult relationship–with someone who may not be interested in adding a romantic dimension to their intellectual attractions–are compelling.
The strength of the novel is its sense of isolation and displacement–she doesn’t really belong at Harvard, and when she travels to Europe, she doesn’t really belong in any of her destinations. The struggle, of course, is that same strength offers obstacles to deeply connecting with the world view of the protagonist: detachment only goes so far.
It has been too many decades since I read Dostoevsky’s novel by the same name for me to day anything intelligent about the echoes or homages between the two works, although a relationship is explicitly acknowledged by Batuman in the epilogue.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
The travelogue bit is, I think, the strongest part of the novel, and it moves from setting to setting in a way that stays strongly with the reader. It also requires an impressionistic treatment of the other locales that I find very difficult to do.