Excerpt from Either/Or by Elif Batuman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Svetlana got to campus the day after me, though it felt like years. I had already slept the night in my new room, eaten breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, and made numerous trips back and forth to the storage facility, having the same conversation over and over. "How was your summer?" "How was your summer?" "How was Hungary?" I was dissatisfied by the vagueness of my own answers. I still hadn't figured out the right angle.

"How was Hungary?" Lakshmi asked at lunch, with a conspiratorial sparkle. "Did anything happen?" Notwithstanding my strong feeling that a lot of things had happened, I answered the question truthfully in the sense that I knew Lakshmi intended it. Nothing had happened.

Svetlana asked me the same question that evening, when we met at her warehouse-like suite in new Quincy, and sat on bean-bag chairs under an Edward Hopper poster, and talked about everything that had happened since the last time we had spoken-when I had been in a phone booth in the K‡l train station, and Svetlana had been at her grandmother's house in Belgrade. I told her how I had finally called Ivan in Budapest, how he had showed up with a canoe, and we had sat up all night at his parents' house.

"Did anything happen?" she asked, in a lazier, more amused voice than Lakshmi's, but meaning the same thing.

"Well, like, that one thing didn't happen," I said.

"Oh, Selin," Svetlana said.

When Ivan first told me about the summer program in Hungary, he said I should take my time to think about it, because he didn't want to force me into anything. Svetlana said that, if I agreed to go, Ivan was going to try to have sex with me. This was a possibility I had never previously considered. I daydreamed about Ivan all the time, imagining different conversations we might have, how he might look at me, touch my hair, kiss me. But I never thought about having sex. What I knew about "having sex" didn't correspond to anything I wanted or had felt.

I had tried, on multiple occasions, to put in a tampon. Tampons were spoken of by older or more sophisticated girls as being somehow more liberated and feminist than maxi pads. "I just put one in and forget about it." I felt troubled by the implication that a person was constantly thinking about their maxi pad. Nonetheless, every few months I would give tampons another shot. It was always the same. No matter what direction I pushed the applicator, however methodically I tried all the different angles, the result was a blinding, electric pain. I read and reread the instructions. Clearly I was doing something wrong, but what? It was worrisome, especially since I was pretty sure that a guy-that Ivan-would be bigger than a tampon. But at that point my brain stopped being able to entertain it, it became unthinkable.

Svetlana said I had better think about it. "You wouldn't want to end up in that situation and not have thought about it," she said, reasonably. And yet, it turned out there wasn't much to think about. It was immediately obvious that if Ivan tried to have sex with me, I would let him. Maybe he would be able to tell me what I had been doing wrong, and it wouldn't be as terrible as trying to put in a tampon.

But he hadn't tried, and all the nights we sat up late together, all we did was talk. Then he left for Thailand, at the end of July, and I still had another ten days in the village, surrounded by people who weren't him. A strange thing: I had gone to Hungary in some way to understand Ivan better, because being Hungarian was such a big deal for him-and it was only in the villages that I had realized, with a certain shock, that, although Hungarianness was a big part of Ivan, Ivan himself was only a very small part of Hungary. On some level, I had always known that 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.

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