Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

You didn’t have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love.

This was the most exciting part: learning that the truth was something that really could be verified,

I knew that feminists liked it when societies worshipped mothers. Why didn’t I want to look at her?

But clearly bars were just where I did have to do research, not just for Let’s Go, but so I would understand the human condition.

It seemed to me that Mesut’s life was more real than mine, though how could anyone’s life be any more real than anyone else’s?

In Turkish, you could “hear” a smell.

I tried to assimilate this new information—to accord it its correct importance.

It did start to feel less pointless, the more you did it.

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare.

ribald

I concluded that having an orgasm must not have been the point, and that not having had one wasn’t the reason for the vague unsatisfied feeling I had sometimes. The reason must have been something else.

Had anything I had ever done in my whole life delighted anyone so much as that one act of depilation delighted Mesut?

“Love is to get caught on something,” he said readily. “It’s to be unable to forget.”

said I was clearly a good person to be so sad.

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

I eventually gave up trying

to explain anything to anyone.

Rashomon

But had they definitely gone wrong? Hadn’t their lives been great, in a way, furnishing the plots of great books?

Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

Isabel, who had had the experiences, hadn’t written a book; Henry James, who had written the book, hadn’t had the experiences.

plot. I didn’t get how you could have a person without circumstances.

he went on to say that, if you did do that subtle and monstrous thing, you would definitely find what you had been looking for.

I started to feel the combined annoyance and exhilaration that sometimes came over me on airplanes.

I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.”