READER’S DIGEST
July• 2019 | 117EVERYONE’S A CRITICFeel like renting a good movie? Don’t waste your time with these
hits, say disgruntled reviewers on Amazon.Back to the Future Part II: “This was the most unrealistic load
of junk that one could ever see in their life. Time travel is only
possible at 180,000 miles per second, not 88 miles per hour.”Free Willy: Escape From Pirate’s Cove:“How many times must
Willy be freed before he’s freed?”Pitch Perfect: “What is wrong with filmmakers today? This film
has captured my daughter’s flights of fancy, and now she thinks
she can sing.”The Wolf of Wall Street: “There were no wolves in this movie.”and Babayev’s sculptures. He tells me
his father was born in 1927 into an ed-
ucated home with Azeri books written
in the prevalent Muslim Arabic script.
Within two years the Azeri alphabet
would change to Latin characters
in an effort to secularise it. The shift
lasted a decade, until Joseph Stalin’s
government demanded that all official
textbooks and documents be print-
ed in the Russian Cyrillic. When the
Soviet Union fell, the Cyrillic reverted
to the Latin alphabet.
“When you change an alphabet,
you change history,” Babayev tells
me. “You lose your culture.”
The conversation weighs on both of
us, so he proposes a swim. We walk
past newly constructed residences,
some thought to be owned by the
ruling Aliyev family, that have made
beach access more difficult. Babayev
shrugs. “We adapt.”
At the end of an alley, beyond
a stretch of rocks and sand, is the
Caspian Sea, considered the world’s
largest inland body of water. Around
Baku it has been polluted by years of
neglect, but here it is translucent.
“Like a thousand years ago,”
Babayev says.
To the east, somewhere across the
blue expanse, is the nation of Turk-
menistan. To the northwest, I spot
the mountains of southern Russia. I
pull off my shoes. The water is chilly,
but I duck into its gentle waves and
begin to swim.
FROMNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER(APRIL/MAY 2018), © BY BRUCE SCHOENFELD,
WWW.NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM