54 pages • 1 hour read
Elif BatumanEither/Or
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Summer”
Part 4, Chapter 13 Summary: “June”
Selin arrives in Ankara, where she is staying with her grandmother. She recalls past summer trips to Turkey, and although she’d always been enchanted by the sweet shops and her grandmother’s apartment, her memories are mostly of the jet lag of the first week of the visit: She would read all of the books she had brought for the summer during her sleepless nights and then spend the duration of the summer re-reading them. She hates to admit it, but she never truly enjoyed the time she spent in her parents’ home country.
Selin peruses the Ankara section in past versions of the guide and buys a Turkish cell phone. Part of her work is to look for errors in the guide, and after a few days of homebound jet lag with her grandmother, she sets off to explore Ankara. Much of what is written in the guide turns out to be accurate; the work is easy, and she enjoys the freedom of being on her own in the city. She visits the Hittite museum and is fascinated by its large sculptures and a diorama of a Neolithic family.
Selim also has to explore Ankara’s nightlife. Clubs, bars, and restaurants are an important part of the guidebooks. Selin learned at Harvard that going out to bars and drinking are critical elements of social life for most people her age, but she is still ill at ease in such settings. She struggles to decipher what kind of bars she is visiting: What is their typical clientele like? What kind of person would like this bar? As she is walking around a club trying to figure out whether or not she is looking at “club kids,” a man approaches her to tell her that her car is ready. Selin has not ordered a car. It turns out that her family, worried about her because she has been tasked with wandering around at night, has had her followed by Turkish intelligence. After finishing her work in Ankara, she leaves for Tokat, a small town that her mother does not feel should be included in guidebooks and to which she objects Selin traveling alone.
Selin proceeds through several different towns and cities, including Cappadocia, famous for its caves and hot air balloons. She meets people who are aghast that she is studying Russian literature, and she remembers that many Turks are still upset about the Crimean War and the host of other military campaigns Russia has waged in and around Turkish territory throughout history. One of the towns she is to visit and write about is small, out of the way, and difficult to reach by bus. When she asks how to get there, a man named Mesut offers her a ride. She explains that she has to take the bus because she is doing research, but she agrees to let him drive her home. He wants to eat dinner together, and although she initially declines, she later agrees. Afterward, he kisses her and the two end up having sex. It is still incredibly painful, and she is not sure what “the point” of it all is. She does continue to spend time with Mesut, and in spite of their differences, they get along. When she leaves, she realizes that she will never see him again and becomes emotional.
Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary: “July”
In Adana, Selin spends time with her cousin Evren. North Cyprus, the disputed territory claimed by Turkey, is on her itinerary, and she has difficulty attaining permission to get there. She knows that the editorial staff at Let’s Go have an ill-informed understanding of regional politics based on stereotypes about ancient feuds. They take the threat of Kurdish militants more seriously because there have been recent terrorist attacks not only in Turkey but also in western Europe.
Selin continues on her planned route and is gradually met by hoteliers rather than government officials. These owners of small inns and pensions have heard of Let’s Go but do not fully grasp that she cannot write whatever they want her to include about their businesses. Selin also feels somewhat torn between her own ideas about travel and the tone and tenor of a Let’s Go guide. The company encourages American tourists to stay at “dives” and encourages its writers to point out “overpriced” food, but Selin thinks that some of the “dives” are truly depressing and does not take issue with food prices being slightly elevated at lodgings that themselves cost more than the budget accommodations.
Selin has another liaison with a Turkish man, a hostel worker named Volkan. Although she enjoys sex with him more, she finds his personality tiresome and tries unsuccessfully to leave him behind when she proceeds to Konya. He shows up, and there is trouble because the city is one of the stops on the pilgrimage to Mecca; society is religious enough that it is improper for the two to stay together in a hotel. Volkan bribes the receptionist so that they can spend one night there. Selin visits Rumi’s mausoleum and, afterward, reads portions of his work translated into both Turkish and English in the gift shop.
In Antalya, she has another encounter with a Turkish man named Koray. He is handsome, but his erratic behavior makes her uncomfortable, and she is not quite sure if he is “mentally unwell.” Just as they are about to have sex, she pushes him away and runs to lock herself in the bathroom. She realizes that she has a urinary tract infection and, on the advice of her mother, goes to a hospital, where she tells the physician that her parents are also physicians. She is given inexpensive medicine and is struck by how much easier the experience was than visiting the student health center at Harvard.
Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary: “August”
Selin visits Olympos, where she is pursued by two unappealing men, and she stays in a treehouse by the sea. It is her last stop before returning to Antalya. In three days, she will leave for Moscow. She prepares the last of her copy and begins to read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. She finds many parallels to her own life. In the way that James writes about writing in his prefatory material, she also finds echoes of her own philosophy about writing: She is interested in making sense of her experiences, narrating mundane details with humor, and creating true-to-life characters out of the framework of real people whom she knows. She leaves for Moscow, and when she arrives, her luggage has been lost. With only her messenger bag, she feels lighter than air. She realizes that all of her past travels have been to countries with whom her friends and family have connections. She is in Russia because she fell in love with its national literature, and this is the first trip that she is undertaking completely of her own volition.
Part 4 Analysis
During this section of the narrative, Selin is in Turkey working on her Let’s Go guide. The sense of cultural dislocation she feels as an American in Turkey, even as a Turkish American, is acute, and Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience continues to be an important theme. Although she still feels like an outsider much of the time, Selin continues to engage socially more frequently and has a series of trysts with Turkish men. She reads Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which leads her to a series of revelations about herself and her writing, and she sets off for Moscow with a more thorough understanding of her self-identity.
Although she loves her grandmother, Selin feels out of place in Ankara, and it is not a space where she reconnects (or connects in the first place) with a sense of Turkish identity. Indeed, she does not feel a particular sense of connection to her Turkish roots. Her summers in Turkey have largely been spent reading Russian novels, and she recalls approaching those vacations with a sense of dread about the difficulty of jet lag rather than in anticipation of the opportunity to spend time abroad. In this way, Selin’s characterization continues to speak to the theme of identity, college, and the “immigrant” experience. “Turkish-ness” is not a particularly integral part of her identity, nor does she ruminate much on what life is like for first-generation immigrants in America. In Turkey, she is struck by her American-ness and does not feel as though she is returning to a homeland, cultural or otherwise.
She continues to feel like an outsider as she explores Turkish nightlife for Let’s Go. She is fascinated by what she finds in museums and is much more comfortable in spaces dedicated to intellection and learning. Bars and clubs, however, confuse her. She is never sure what kind of club she is in and struggles to recommend particular venues to particular kinds of people. Part of her developmental trajectory has been in becoming more comfortable in social spaces and with the kinds of activities (like going to bars) that people her age tend to enjoy. However, in this section of the narrative, her growth trajectory also includes accepting a certain amount of her bookish introversion. Part of what makes her successful at writing travel guides is her willingness to spend long stretches of time alone. For Selin, the push and pull between two poles of identification will not become navigating between a “Turkish” and “American” self but developing the ability to mediate between solitude and socializing.
Literary Analysis and Self-Examination continues to be an important theme in this section, and the text that resonates the most with her is Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Although there is much within this story that seems to have particular relevance to Selin, it is the author’s meditations on writing that strike the greatest chord with her. James is a kindred spirit, and in his descriptions of his desire to create multifaceted characters and to narrate the real-life details of existence, no matter how mundane, she finds echoes of her own early goals as a budding writer. Henry James’s realistic, character-driven story appeals to her, and it is in part because she finds these analytical touchstones within her favorite novels that she is able to forge her own identity as a writer in opposition to the kind of analytical projects encouraged in her classes at Harvard.
As the novel ends, Selin arrives in Moscow, and she is struck by the uniqueness of this journey. Each time she traveled in the past, it was to a country to which one of her friends and family members had a connection: Turkey is her parents’ home country, and the summer she’d spent in Hungary was at the suggestion of Ivan and his friend Peter. She is in Russia because she fell in love with Russian language and literature; it is a journey that is rooted in her own ideas and experiences and in the identity that she is forging for herself based on her interests rather than her ethno-national identity or status as the child of immigrants. This dynamic reflects the theme of Education Versus Learning, emphasizing once again the power of pursuit of personal interests, rather than the pursuit of institutionally defined knowledge, in true learning. Russia, for Selin, represents the pinnacle of self-definition and self-discovery. The end of the novel, in turn, suggests that she has finally arrived not only in the country that interests her the most but also in a place of authenticity and possibility.
