WORDS FEEL TACTILE, LIKE PHYSICAL OBJECTS. YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THEM BEING FLIPPED AROUND AND OBSERVED FROM ARM'S LENGTH

text from their class. It’s hard to explain all of this in a way that makes total sense. The Russian text is a story, about a spurned scientist who follows her lover to Siberia, that is written with progressively more difficult language and grammar. In the early chapters the characters can’t use certain tenses or verbs. They cannot speak with intention or causality. Simple questions that could clear up so many things go unasked and unanswered, just because the characters don’t have the words.

Selif and Ivan’s relationship plays out in a similar fashion. They begin with emails that feel almost totally inscrutable to each other. “I read the message over and over,” Selif thinks about one. “I wasn’t sure why he had written it, but I could see that it had taken a long time, and that he was trying to be delightful.” They eventually meet again in person, in a series of what could potentially be interpreted as dates, but seem forever unable or unwilling to speak plainly to each other of their intentions or desires. (Ivan also, it eventually emerges, has a girlfriend.) They email back and forth. They meet and don’t touch. They even arrange to be in Hungary at the same time in the summer.

The Idiot is, on some level, about the limits of language. It’s about facts that don’t change no matter how many words are spun around them. “I like someone who doesn’t like me,” Selif tells her roommate in a rare moment of clarity. “I had thought of it as an approximation, but once I said it, it felt like the truth.”

There is much more to this book, though, than a stillborn love story between obtuse and confusing nerds. The Idiot takes every narrative off-ramp available. It’s a big book, part campus novel, part linguistic farce. There are side trips and side characters – endless digressions and diversions from the central plot. It is a difficult book to describe. It is also, from beginning to end, a complete pleasure. I read all 422 pages in a day and a half and wasn’t the least bit tired of it when I was done.

Batuman has such a distinct eye for both the absurd and the mundane. She conjures this world – sheltered, hyper-smart and off-kilter – so wonderfully. I would listen to her describe almost anything, even old emails written between lovers who never come close to kissing, let alone having sex.