Elif
Batuman

“I’m going to become whatever I was going to become,” says Batuman’s Elif-like narrator Selin in Either/Or (2022), after someone jokes that her freshman-year crush from Hungary may have been a spy sent to Harvard to ruin promising young women.  

In her genre-busting essay collection The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), she writes: “If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.”   

Batuman’s oeuvre unfolds as an ongoing conversation with world literature shaped by place as much as by reading. Born in the United States to Turkish immigrant parents, she lived in Istanbul during the three years leading up to the Gezi Park protests, teaching and writing for The New Yorker, where she’s still a staff writer. At the end of her time in Turkey, she uncovered “five hard hats, three pairs of goggles, and two gas masks” in her apartment.  

She was now expected by contract to write a novel set in Istanbul, but kept finding herself writing instead about her college years. While in graduate school, she had written a novel about her freshman year, then put it away. Fifteen years later, in search of contemporary reference points for her demanding flashbacks, Batuman found her Pulitzer-finalist debut novel, The Idiot (2017), hiding in the cloud.   

“I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book,” writes Selin early in The Idiot about her email romance. Unable to skip through time as an eighteen-year-old in 1995, she comes to see writing as a way of expanding the present, “like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.”  

Batuman was on book tour with The Idiot during Trump’s first term and the rise of #MeToo. Reading queer theory in that moment and Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” for the first time, she wrote the sequel Either/Or as an archival inquiry into why she encountered so few of these texts and ideas earlier in life, and why she had assumed they were not meant for her.  

Inthe best-selling Either/Or, Selin reads Kierkegaard and adopts the aesthetic life as the only one worth novelizing. “I could use the aesthetic life as an algorithm to solve my two biggest problems: how to live, and how to write novels? In any real-life situation, I would pretend I was in a novel, and then do whatever I would want the person in the novel to do,” she writes. If only Selin had encountered less self-destructive fictional heroines to mold herself after in all the classics she devoured.  

In recent profiles of French filmmaker Céline Sciamma and Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, and in her essay “Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War,” Elif Batuman continues to trace the converging narratives of politics, literature, and life. “The hidden mechanisms of patriarchy and expansionism,” she writes, “suddenly came into focus as two facets of the same huge apparatus.”  

Batuman is currently at work on a new book that meets Selin at forty-five as the author of two acclaimed college novels, now taking on the task of writing the book that catches her up to the present.  

Nazlı Koca
is the author of The Applicant, a diary novel about a Turkish ex-student turned cleaner in Berlin on an expiring visa.