Wonderful

Strange and beautiful

A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur

You’re in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story… Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea… The plot spins faster than its main character’s head. What elevates this novella are the scalpelsharp observations about McGlue’s nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It’s a wild ride.

Moshfegh is… a superlative short-story writer… McGlue, which owes as much to Cormac McCarthy as it does to Poe or Melville, is an entertaining curio with some lovely baroque flourishes.

A haunting men-on-boats noir, Ottessa Moshfegh’s first work of fiction… is Moby Dick through a broken, twisted looking glass. Moshfegh writes a fascinating, ugly form of brotherhood, shot through with homophobic homoeroticism, violence and taboo. It is a pungent novella, that revels in its own foulness with a wink and a nudge… Moshfegh’s sharp, strangely textured prose makes McGlue shock in all the right ways.

The mixture of brutality and tenderness was so surprising and moving to me

Compelling reading

Superbly plotted and paced

I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.

Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.

Elif Batuman's novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.

Rambling, ramshackle, erudite; full of careless charm… Her jokes are one of this book’s great joys.

There are very few things in life that are better than finding a novel that takes you somewhere you’ve never been, and reveals a world that you know nothing about: and that’s what lives at the heart of The Idiot. Fresh, fascinating and filled with details that are impossibly foreign and intricately fascinating, it’s a must-read for everyone looking to step outside their own lives for a little while and learn something about the experience of someone else coming into their own in such a difficult world.

Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.

The Idiot is a baffling, if brilliant, first novel.

[A] witty, smart and endlessly-entertaining coming-of-age story.

The Idiot is an affectionate portrait of first love in all its bumbling haplessness, and a playful celebration of the power and limitations of language.

Very funny indeed. The Idiot is the richly observant story of [Selin's] unique and eccentric coming of age.

Generously capacious… The triumph of Batuman’s book is to make this period of youth matter.

You know when you love someone but they don’t love you back?... It’s a feeling so expertly drawn in The Idiot that you may well start to get flashbacks of your own unrequited tristes… The Idiot is beautiful in every passage, in every turn of the phrase, and full of wry observations that make you feel as if you’ve never really seen the world.

Batuman captures the amplified, airless banality of the 1990s with flip sentences… Light-hearted but of high quality, it falls into the loafing abroad, goofing and self-knowing genre.

The whole novel is full of hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes.

One of the funniest and most inventive youngish writers of non-fiction in America… Selin’s meandering observations and gentle humour make her an engaging narrator… Batuman examines complex subjects with an appealing lightness of touch… The scene when Selin leaves the Hungarian village is surprisingly moving and encapsulates the overall effect of a novel which reminds us that dead time can be full of life.

Sweetly funny, The Idiot rejects the doctrine of omitting needless words in favour of marvelling…at the complexities of language and communication.

Charming… A gentle coming-of-age novel drawing on Batuman’s time at Harvard in the mid-1990s… It’s in such acute portrayals of early adulthood’s uncertainties that this pleasantly rambling tale leaves its most vivid impression.

A delightfully digressive campus novel.

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius