Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

The Ukrainian Research Institute was in a wooden colonial house, with offices in the different rooms. About a third of the people who worked there were actually Ukrainian, and seemed always on the verge of being really upset. If anyone said “the Ukraine,” instead of “Ukraine,” or assumed that some word in Ukrainian was the same as in Russian, or asked whether a Ukrainian writer wrote in Russian, it was enough to push them over the edge. This kind of touchiness was familiar to me from Turkish people, and gave me a fond, protective feeling.

Some had clearly put a lot of thought into their clothes. Others seemed to have waterproofed their own persons as peremptorily as if they were lawn furniture.

I loved Tatiana, because she didn’t hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue. You still met people like that: people who acted as if admitting to any feelings of love, before you had gotten a man to buy you stuff, was a violation—not of pragmatism, or even of etiquette, but of morality. It meant you didn’t have self-control, you couldn’t delay gratification, you had failed the stupid marshmallow test. Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty. If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn’t want them.

In matters of love, we were too smart and honest to play games. We could only be happy with the kind of man who didn’t need some huge charade. The men who needed a charade, though more numerous, weren’t worth bothering with. Not only was it impossible for us to attract them, because we were constitutionally incapable, but they weren’t worth attracting, they weren’t capable of real love.

A person “threw himself or herself [but let’s face it, probably herself] from floor to floor,” or “beat her head from one stone to another stone.” The reason she behaved in this way was because a man had paid more attention to another woman—to the kind of woman who played games. And good riddance: clearly, the man had been intimidated by our intelligence and honesty.

There were signs that it was, in fact, possible to suffer enormously over cowards with bad taste.

Oop

that it was better to be smart and honest than to play games.

On the whole, I thought, I had been right to write to Ivan. Just by typing some words on a computer, I had caused so many things to happen in the world—sleep to be lost, plane tickets to be bought, money to change hands. In a way, it had been a test of what a person could achieve just through writing. But there were also times when I worried that I had acted foolishly and without dignity.

when we were in middle school, my father had taken me and Leora to New York to see Les Misérables. In the car afterward, he had complained about the sentimentalization of motherhood—how motherhood, “mother love,” was supposed to automatically make a character saintly, but in fact Fantine in Les Misérables was a prostitute and had dubious morality, and wasn’t like Jean Valjean, who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed his family.

had always been part of my identity to feel more objective than either of my parents—to be able to choose between their views, to retain the parts I found useful and discard the rest.

Wasn’t the whole point of Les Misérables, and not a very subtle one, that Fantine being a prostitute wasn’t that different from Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family? And the way my father said “to feed his family” was at least as annoying as the way my mother said “my child.”

It was a constant problem for Priya: men desperately, bald-facedly offering her things they didn’t have. That was what it was to be beautiful.

I didn’t realize until I got to the end that it was a really depressing story. There was a pause.

Highly relatable

She kept the cigarettes in a vintage cigarette case, in her underwear drawer. Lewis seemed to perk up when she mentioned underwear.

I had mixed feelings about this beautiful nonsmoker. On the one hand, I despised her for talking so much and saying so little, and for seeming so unaware of Riley’s expression. On the other hand, at least she was talking with enthusiasm about something that she liked to do, alone, just for the sake of having an experience, or thinking of herself a certain way.

When I tuned back in to the conversation, I realized with an undertone of panic that that girl was still talking about how she smoked one cigarette every day. Why was this happening? Why were we all sitting here? She was reiterating how she had to be alone; how she had dealt in the past with the efforts of different people to join her. Then she returned, with sickening inevitability, to her inability to state whether or not she was addicted.

Listening to an all-Spanish album by Itzhak Perlman made me feel a shimmer of hope, as if life itself might be like those deadly violinistic showpieces: important, complex, to be performed with precision and flair.

The next pages were still unreadably boring. But this time, I kept going. If there was anything in there that could change my life, I wasn’t going to let a few boring pages stand in my way.

I must adopt this Mentality

When you were trying to solve a mystery, and you came across a name you had encountered earlier in your investigation, it was a sign that you were on the right trail.

In these words, I caught a glimmer of some possibility of freedom. I realized that my inability to do what he was talking about—to disguise the people I knew and turn them into fictional “characters”—had been the biggest problem I had in writing, and thus in my plan of life. In some way it was a bigger problem than Ivan—or maybe Ivan was a part of that problem, which had predated him by many years.

It turned out that writing what you were already thinking about wasn’t creative, or even writing. It was “navel-gazing.” To be obsessed by your own life experience was childish, egotistical, unartistic, and worthy of contempt.

I didn’t want to seem like I was constantly harping on being Turkish. I didn’t like books where the whole point seemed to be that the person was from some country, and they kept going on about the food. And yet, the things I was writing about somehow didn’t make sense unless the people were from another country, and I didn’t know enough about any other countries besides Turkey.

One of the line cooks, for example, got a kidney stone, which everyone said was the most painful thing in the world next to childbirth. (What if people said boys had to have two kidney stones by the time they were thirty—as the man my aunt eventually married, enabling her to leave the diner, had often told me about childbirth?)

I knew that the kidney stone and the tripe soup weren’t, in themselves, a story; I couldn’t just copy them down and call it creative writing. I had to identify the universal human situation they represented, and develop it, using my imagination.

But the seed of panic had been planted. My eyes had been opened to the dissimilarity between the kind of writing I was always doing, and an actual novel.

For some reason, I found myself remembering how my mother and I used to laugh about Mommie Dearest, a book written by Joan Crawford’s daughter, which neither of us had read, but which my mother often invoked, saying “Mommie Dearest” in a high-pitched voice, whenever she made me do anything.

Wait this is where this js from!!

I remembered another joke my mother used to make, when she did anything she thought was wrong, like telling a white lie over the phone, or unbuckling her seat belt while driving: “Don’t put this in your novel.” That, too, had always made me laugh,

But why was I thinking about my mother now, when the subject was Ivan? Ugh: “Ivan.” Telling anyone his name always felt like a betrayal—

God so ducking true

“I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.”

Why were other people’s coincidences always so boring?

Claire listening to other peoples’ dreams

The Slavic department had a different atmosphere at night: like an airport, or like the past.

But modeling for Playboy to pay for Harvard was not the same as having sex with your landlord to not get evicted.

But his viewpoint invalidated mine. If one person thought it was a conversation, and the other person thought it wasn’t a conversation, the second person was right.

The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell’s definition of electricity as “not so much a thing as a way things happen,” Nadja is not so much a person as a way she makes people behave. Just imagine being told that you weren’t a person, but a way you made other people behave. “Well, I can’t say I think much of the effect I’m having on you,” I would say.

“That’s what can happen when you fetishize an aesthetic life. It can make you irresponsible and destructive,” Svetlana said later, about André Breton. “But people like that can invent a new style, and I can appreciate that.”

“What should he have done when he met Nadja?” I asked. “If he wasn’t being irresponsible and destructive.” She thought it over. “He could have tried to be a force of stability in her life, and avoided getting romantically involved with her.” I felt ...

Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women’s craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.

But sometimes something shone like a gold ring at the bottom of the stream, and a sentence came to me with perfect clarity. Like this one: “Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

Irina Nikolaevna couldn’t possibly know what I wanted. And I would never not want it.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

“He played the mandolin everywhere—incessantly,” I said.

This is so bsing in another language core

What were the regrets that came later? Was it that she had thought he loved her, and then it turned out he didn’t? It couldn’t be that, again—could it? Was that what everything was about?

I wanted to talk to her more, to find out more about her, but the guy next to her kept interrupting with a point he was trying to make about the area that a cow would graze if it was tied to a “movable fence.” I sawed at a piece of grilled asparagus. Didn’t the very essence of a fence reside in the fact that it was stationary?

Daily experience of women

The radio in the Quincy kitchen was playing the new Alanis Morissette single, “Head over Feet.” It was about having the maturity to want something good for you. I felt outraged.

Now she was marveling at how “healthy” she felt, now that she had the ability to “want something rational.” It was clear that the rational thing she wanted was some boring guy.

Oh dear selin

Svetlana said she liked Tsvetaeva: objectively the cooler choice. I felt more similar to Akhmatova, so I defended her, but I wasn’t happy about it.

One poem was called “Today No Letter Was Delivered to Me.”

On the nose

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

Urrrrr

More broadly, I mistrusted the project of trying to generalize a set of rules that would work in all circumstances. Surely, whatever rule anyone thought of, there would be some situations where it wouldn’t work. I

but once we were talking I felt that her worldview and feelings were more aligned with mine than with theirs, because we were girls. For example, when something was weird, we were able to say so, and it felt a little less weird.