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.

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?

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities.

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

Bob looked like he was in pain. “So you’re saying that Nurhan M. Karadağ and Nurhan M. Karadağ are two different people.” I felt sorry for him. Every time I saw this guy, I ruined his day.