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.

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.

Now the Pilates instructor was talking about closing our rib cages. I often couldn’t tell if the things she said about ribs were literal or figurative.

As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.

Svetlana had pointed out that, if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist.

I remembered some advice I had read in Seventeen magazine, when I had pneumonia and my mother had therefore gotten me Seventeen magazine, about what to do with your hands When He Kissed You. It said to put one hand on his neck and the other on his chest. The hand on the chest let you feel how strong and sexy he was, but also gave you “control.”
I put my hand on his chest, to feel how strong and sexy he was—somehow unexpectedly solid, like a statue, though also, of course, alive. He smelled faintly and intoxicatingly of aftershave, and of sweat, which didn’t make sense, because the smell of sweat was usually repulsive. With my other hand, barely daring to touch the back of his neck, I felt the place where his buzz cut started. It felt so tender and dear and alive—so full of life. What an amazing thing a neck was, the way all the blood in a human body had to pass through it, and how easy that made it to kill someone, and this easiness of killing a man also felt dear and close to my heart.

He pulled a Kleenex from a box wedged between the bed frame and the wall. Kleenex, not toilet paper: a class act, I thought, because part of me was always generating a commentary.

Lakshmi was my friend, so I was on her side. Yet for some reason my mind was working to figure out what she had done wrong. Had she been “using” Joey, to make herself feel less badly about Noor? On the other hand, wasn’t that what you were supposed to do: give up on the bad boy you liked, and maturely, self-respectingly accept the attentions of a less charismatic guy who had proven his essential goodness by wanting to be with you? Wasn’t that the plot of 40 percent of romantic comedies?

I knew from music theory class that, when Middle Eastern music sounded like wailing, or like it was out of tune, it was because our ears—my ears—had been desensitized by the conventions of Western music. The Middle Eastern scale had twenty-four tones per octave and was actually more true and real than the twelve-tone version that European people had invented to make a piano work.