Bildungsroman In Budapest

On Budapest, The Idiot, and adolescent angst.

I was in Budapest in September – a week of solo travel tacked to the end of a business trip.

I picked the city for several reasons – alleged beauty, affordability, and (ultimately incorrect) vague notions that I’d need an off-the-beaten-track palate cleanser post-Paris. Also, when I was debating destinations, I listened to an episode of I Have To Ask in which Issac Chotiner interviewed Elif Batuman about The Idiot, her novel set partly in Hungary. Just like that – sold.

Budapest was uneven. Where it’s spectacular, it’s almost unimaginably so. Gilded, ornate, and beautiful. Soaring parliament ceilings, eye-popping colors, thermal baths that bear more resemblance to Versailles than to a swimming pool. But then there’s the rest of it. A different, more difficult kind of beauty. While in this city, I stayed in the 8th, a neighborhood of faded glory. Its dark streets are lined by once-gorgeous buildings – with high ceilings, elaborate facades, and internal courtyards – gone to damp, musty, paint-peeling seed.

Bits of The Idiot are set in the latter Budapest. While there, I passed mornings dangling my legs between rails of my moldering AirBnB balcony, gazing down to rain-streaked streets, reading about Selin and Ivan’s drives down avenues just like these. I went to Memento Park – a suburban tract of land where dozens of Communist-era statues have been rounded up somewhat unceremoniously – about 50 pages before Selin did. And after two weeks on the road and five days alone, I felt almost as unhinged and rootless in the city as Selin seemed to be.

For me, The Idiot was that rare kind of novel I missed even as I was reading it – anticipating that empty feeling when something comforting ends and there’s nothing to fill the void. It’s a bildungsroman – a coming-of-age novel, albeit one for an age of immense ambivalence. This happens to be how I like my novels. Angst and ennui are literary catnip for me: a time-machine to the years I spent dissecting and despairing, a palliative for the occasional days I still do.

In some respects, The Idiot was an entirely foreign object – I know nothing of dorm rooms at Harvard, little of apartments in Paris, still less of rural Hungarian villages. Yet the book also felt surprisingly familiar – full of ideas about identity, bursting with keen observations, layering one missed connection atop another. Read it and feel all the beautiful pain of being 18 again.