Summary

The Idiot opens in the early 1990s, with Selin Karadağ, a Turkish-American, arriving at Harvard University where she is set to study literature and language. She moves into a shared apartment with two other women her age, Hannah and Angelina, and shares a room with the cheery but passive-aggressive Hannah. Unsure of herself and what to study, Selin signs up for various classes, though she is not accepted into many of her first choices due to awkward interviews. She ends up taking classes in nonfiction films, an art course called "Constructed Worlds," a course on nineteenth-century European novels, and a Russian language course. She also attends lectures on linguistics.

In Russian classes Selin meets another student named Svetlana, originally from Yugoslavia (which broke up into six countries in 1992), and Ivan, a Hungarian. She is enchanted by the handsome Ivan but does not speak to...