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.

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.

I thought of an episode of Sex and the City, when Samantha got stood up in a restaurant, by a real-estate tycoon, and started crying, right in front of “the Pakistani busboy.” Carrie called him that in the voice-over, though he looked to be in his forties. At the coat check, the Pakistani busboy kissed Samantha—“Samantha let the Pakistani busboy kiss her; after all, he’d been so sweet and attentive with the bread”—and suggested they leave together. Samantha hesitated, then recovered her self-respect just in time to give him a big tip and leave with her head held high. Yes, that was it: you were supposed to remember that you were better than him.

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare. And weren’t the two related? The animus I had previously felt . . . not toward Shakespeare himself—what had he ever done except write some plays?—but toward the story that was told about his universal humanity, its virtuosic expression through earthy ribald wordplay, such that Shakespeare said “nothing” and meant a vagina, or said “O” and meant a vagina, or said “country matters” and meant a vagina.

Conversely, to “pay the tourist price” wasn’t just to lose money, but to capitulate to panderers: to fail to support the truly deserving and authentic. The way you supported the deserving and authentic was apparently by paying them less.

Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

Moscow does not believe in tears.

Sevastopol does not believe in earwax.

Minsk does not believe in black bile.