March 7, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is unquestionably Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The View from the Stands.” From the moment I read its opening sentence - “One cold, wet morning in December, I headed into Istanbul to watch the Beşiktaş soccer team play a match against Bursaspor, a team from the city of Bursa, the original Ottoman capital” – I was hooked. The piece is filled with "thisness" - James Wood's great term for "any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion" (How Fiction Works). Here are some examples of "thisness" in "The View from the Stands": the umbrella seller ("A gaunt young woman in a head scarf and a cheap trenchcoat stood pressed up against an embankment, selling Beşiktaş umbrellas"); tea-drinking ("Ayhan ordered another round of tea, and for a few moments the only sound was the clinking of spoons as the men stirred sugar cubes into their tea"); Ayhan's cigarette ("Eyes narrowed, lips moving silently, he watched the game with total fixity, the cigarette between his fingers turning into a column of ash"); a snack bar near Inönü Stadium ("Out front, under the stars, a young round-faced man was standing at a large charcoal grill, tending to kebaps, green peppers and tomatoes. The smell of grilled lamb filled the air"). And if you enjoy the poetics of place names ("signs always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning," Roland Barthes says in "Proust and Names"), as much as I do, you will relish the way Batuman plunges you into Istanbul's place names: Beşiktaş, Dolmabahçe Palace, Inönü Stadium, Kazan pub, Eagle Café, Üsküdar. Reading "The View from the Stands," I marveled at the variousness of its constituent elements - taxi-driver dialogue, Turkish soccer chants, iPhone news, sociology, history, poetry, the Carşi website, interviews, YouTube videos, all intermixed with Batuman's own vivid accounts of her time hanging out with Deniz, Ayhan, Autobahn, and others. The piece ends beautifully with Batuman imagining herself in the stands under Autobahn's new Beşiktaş banner:

Remembering the Rapid Wien game, I thought of how the new banner would come alive at the next match. It would unfurl itself over you and you would beat at it with your hands as it rolled over the crowd in a great wave, its slogan facing the floodlights and the night sky.

"The View from the Stands" is an inspired piece of writing. I enjoyed it immensely.