Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I found myself remembering a book I’d read where a woman looked in a mirror for the first time after seven years in a gulag, and the face looking back wasn’t her own, but that of her mother. I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it.

was dissatisfied by the vagueness of my own answers. I still hadn’t figured out the right angle.

although Hungarianness was a big part of Ivan, Ivan himself was only a very small part of Hungary.

Hungary was a whole country, home to millions of people who had never met Ivan, and didn’t know or care about him. But apparently I hadn’t completely thought it through, because it still felt like a surprise.

She described the intense relationships that she had formed with boring-sounding freshmen

I feel crushed? Svetlana was only quoting something Scott had said to her. It had nothing to do with me, and Svetlana herself didn’t seem upset.

They were so clearly arbitrary categories that some guy had thought of.

human knowledge had been split into disciplines since Ancient Greece.

“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.”

the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids.

was somehow implicit in my friendship with Svetlana that she wanted to be in “a stable relationship” and to someday have children, while I wanted to have interesting love experiences that I could write about.

recognized the professors’ characteristic delight at not imparting information.

might feel threatened to live with someone who doesn’t have a weaker personality than I do.”

Svetlana was the only person I knew who spoke so candidly. I

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.

It was weird: nothing external had changed, but I felt differently.

assumed from the annoying-looking citation that it was from Shakespeare.

to try to figure out what made it interesting.

The seducer explained the importance of alternating between anguished or ambiguous love letters and ironic in-person meetings.

sounded interesting, but I couldn’t concentrate.

The thought was terrifying but somehow sexually magnetic.

could see right away that he wasn’t going to say anything useful.

was just suddenly so glad I wasn’t you,”

perfidy.

an imaginary relationship with an unavailable person,

Were we really more interesting than other people, or did we only seem that way to ourselves?

Was an equal relationship possible, or did one person always like the other person more?

men valued abilities and things, while women valued feelings and people?

didn’t understand everything she was saying, but every now and then a sentence jumped out and seemed to sparkle midair.

coincidences, viewing them as “the royal road to the unconscious”:

Scanning the environment for some sign as to why it was there,

I realized none of these things was actually a problem for me, so I just went to the library.

interesting

Ural-Altaic language family: a theory about how Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese were related to each other.

I didn’t get why the extremely unhappy person wasn’t allowed to kill herself before she messed up her average.

their body happened to shut down

there were more Armenian people who wanted a recognition day than there were Turkish people who didn’t want one.

It was a disappointment to learn that such petitions actually existed.

I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue.

you had failed the stupid marshmallow test.

The implication of “good riddance”—that love would switch off, like an electric light, once you realized the object of your love was dumb, or cowardly, or had bad taste—was not strictly borne out by observation.

was a relief to find Pushkin corroborating what my relatives had always said: that it was better to be smart and honest than to play games.

had been right to write to Ivan.

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

float gracefully in the air for a moment before disappearing.

I knew that that was what a person was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t know why, or how.

Wasn’t that what a novelist’s job was: transforming real people into fictional characters? But Breton seemed to actually be angry about it.

“navel-gazing.”

The words, “tacos, beige,” written on a piece of looseleaf paper made me feel the foreclosing of every possibility of anything exciting ever happening to me in the rest of my life.

Good writers abound—good novelists are very rare. Kazuo Ishiguro is … not only a good writer, but also a wonderful novelist.