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.

I didn’t like when people used “sweet” about non-sensory experiences. Why were we in my mouth all of a sudden?

By then I was thinking more practically about how to become a writer, and I understood that a person had to appreciate Picasso—not all of him, but the part that was an artist. It was an intellectual exercise that made you feel proud of your open-mindedness and objectivity. You could note how he was an asshole, and hold it in part of your mind, and then, with the rest of your mind, appreciate how totally he had managed to express himself. If you were in favor of individualism, self-expression, and human achievement; if you believed it was admirable to stay alive and awake, to not be deadened and blinded by conventions; if you were generous, subtle, capable of complexity and nuance—capable, to put it differently, of forgiveness, and of surmounting your own grievances in the interest of “the human”—then you had to like Picasso.

What if the only reason I hadn’t liked the book was that I was a girl, and had a big nose—that it was a subject I was “sensitive” about, and I had a personal bias that I had to overcome if I wanted to appreciate the book objectively on its own terms, as Lucas had been able to do?

The Rachel Papers was about a nineteen-year-old guy who wanted to conquer this girl, Rachel, who he thought was out of his league. Later, after they had sex, he decided that she wasn’t smart enough and had a big nose. Her nose made an appearance every few pages. The narrator seemed to take its existence personally, as if it was deliberately flaunting itself to remind him of the low social status that prevented him from conquering someone with a better nose.
At one point, the nose added insult to injury by getting a pimple.

Ezra’s basketball friend, Wei, said that he had been teaching a section on the lambda calculus, and one freshman had hung around afterward, apparently yearning to get something off his chest, before finally blurting: “When do we learn about the lamb?” Wei spoke rarely, but always said something interesting.

Matt was good-natured and didn’t have a self-esteem problem, so you didn’t have to deal with him blaming you for making him feel stupid. On the other hand, the minute you tried to talk about anything interesting, he would swiftly, good-naturedly, inexorably change the subject back to one of the three kinds of things he ever talked about.

Now the Pilates instructor was talking about closing our rib cages. I often couldn’t tell if the things she said about ribs were literal or figurative.