Her formative influences, beyond being a Turkish American brought up in New Jersey, seem to have been her years at Harvard as an undergraduate and later as graduate student at Stanford, two of the most powerful and richest universities in the United States. With her gift for descriptive phrases and epigrammatic, fact-filled, aphoristic prose style it is perhaps inevitable that since her early thirties she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors with whom she falls in love. University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot.
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