A delicious snippet from Elif Batuman’s book on her adventures in Russian literature, as related by Christopher Tayler’s LRB review:
When someone tells [Elif Batuman that] she’ll never understand [Isaac] Babel’s ‘specifically Jewish alienation’, she says: ‘Right. As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.’ (‘So you see the problem,’ the man replies.) That’s as much as we hear about Turko-New Jerseyan alienation, in a discussion which is framed as a debate over the extent to which literature can ‘render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness’….With regard to her distaste for the identity politics-tinged self-exploring encouraged by creative writing schools, she puts her money where her mouth is, and there’s no arguing with that. All the same, I wouldn’t have minded hearing more.
Batuman, I want to hear more too. Though I fear there are more than temperamental reasons for a young American-Turkish writer on the rise to keep her mouth shut.
