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.

When I persisted in talking about Ivan, the psychologist said that I was in an imaginary relationship with an unavailable person, because I was afraid to be in a real relationship with an available person. This struck me as a statement devoid of meaning. What “available person” was he talking about? Where was that person? He didn’t answer and only sat there, his left hand holding his right in a way that displayed his wedding band, in case I had missed the photo on his bookshelf. Obviously I knew that Ivan wasn’t “available.” That was how he, the therapist, knew it: because I had just told him. Obviously I knew that my position was humiliating. I didn’t need some underachiever with a master’s degree to tell me how my problem was that nobody loved me the way he loved his defeated conformist-looking wife.

Anyway, how could therapy even work on me, when I was so far from sharing Svetlana’s therapist-like belief that people should be healthy and well-adjusted, that they should go to bed at the same time every night, even if they were reading or having an interesting conversation, or that it was great and life-affirming to go hiking with some guy, or to get married? Of course therapy worked for someone who believed those things.

Whatever problems I had were of my own making—and that meant I was going to have to solve them myself.

I knew that he had brought up her lack of a boyfriend to make her feel bad, because a few sentences earlier she had upset him by using a word he didn’t know.

It was a disappointment to learn that such petitions actually existed. It seemed churlish to lobby against a “recognition day” for a massacre, whether it had occurred genocidally, or in the course of what some people at Princeton considered to be a normal war. (What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

A famous Soviet bard died. All the Russian instructors were depressed. I saw Galina Fyodorovna crying in the photocopier room. The bard had been an emblem of the Moscow street culture of children, particularly on one famous street. In his honor, all the Russian students had to memorize poems by Pushkin. This made sense according to Russian people’s logic, where everything always connected to Pushkin.

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.