Elif Batuman

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no “went” or “sent,” no intention or causality—just unexplained appearances and disappearances.

I was surprised when she asked if I had a boyfriend. I thought it was clear that I wasn’t someone who had boyfriends.

I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book.

For the first five or six days I didn’t suffer at all, carried along by the change of scene and the sense of a progression. This was the next step in the story. Ivan was in Tokyo and I was here. It was like when two characters in a movie went to two different places.
Then something changed. My life no longer seemed like a movie to me. Ivan was still in the movie, but had left me behind. Nothing extraordinary was happening anymore, or would ever happen again. I was just there with my relatives, living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me any closer to anything. It seemed to me that this state of affairs was a relief to my mother. From her perspective, I thought, the past weeks had been a perilous, temporary adventure, something to be endured, and now things were back to normal. It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her. Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance. This was even more true with my aunts. They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project.

The libraries started giving out plastic bags that said A WET BOOK IS NOT A DEAD DUCK on the side. These bags were supposed to encourage you not to throw out wet books.

each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back.

Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t literature classified by word count? Why wasn’t science classified by country? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology? What made something a religion and not a philosophy? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history?

When we read Hamlet in high school I almost died of impatience. All I thought about at that time was getting out—and Hamlet had done it, he was in college, and then he came back to get entangled in a gross drama related to his mother’s sex life? Because his father told him to, in a pages-long outpouring of moralizing self-pity, where he didn’t say anything to or about Hamlet, and just droned on about how lust was preying on garbage? And then Hamlet went around making cutting remarks to people about his mom? I had no patience for such a person.

Behind a dean’s strained expression, you could glimpse some hidden mechanism ceaselessly translating everything you said into an expression of unreasonableness or immaturity.

Why were poems so expensive, when they had so few words?