The Possessed
Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
If you're going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boys' leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind and resignation of the soul, seek no farther: this is the book for you!
The Possessed draws on Elif Batuman's articles in the New Yorker, Harper's and n+1 to tell the true story of one woman's intellectual and sentimental education and her many strange encounters with fellow scholars devoted-absurdly! melancholically! beautifully!-to the Russian classics.
'A series of gloriously misbegotten adventures in search of Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, Babel, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev…wonderfully vivid.' Chicago Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Life imitates art and even literary theory in this scintillating collection of essays. Stanford lit prof Batuman (recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award) gleans clues to the conundrums of human existence by recalling scenes from her grad-student days in academe and exotic settings like Samarkand. A Tolstoy conference sparks her investigation into the possible murder, both physical and metaphysical, of the great man. She spends a summer in Samarkand reading impenetrable works in Old Uzbek as a window into Central Asia's enigmatic present. (Her baffled pr cis of one legend reads in part, "Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between chicken and sheep.") The book climaxes in a Dostoyevskian psychodrama that swirls around a magnetic grad student in the comp-lit department. Batuman is a superb storyteller with an eye for absurdist detail. Her pieces unfold like beguiling shaggy dog tales that blithely track her own misadventures into colorful exegeses of the fiction and biographies of the masters: she's the rare writer who can make the concept of "mimetic desire" vivid and personal. If you've ever felt like you're living in a Russian novel and who hasn't? Batuman will show you why.
Customer Reviews
Almost helplessly epigrammatical
4.5 stars
Author
American academic and journalist, born in New York City to Turkish parents, grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Harvard College then did a doctorate in comparative literature (Russian and Uzbek) from Stanford, and subsequently taught there. She was also writer-in-residence at Koç University (in Istanbul) for a time, and has published short fiction and non-fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and n+1. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical." (Not sure by whom. Someone smarter than me, for sure.) She is now a staff writer for the New Yorker, but lives in Twin Peaks (where else), San Francisco. I enjoyed her first novel, The Idiot (2017), which was finalist for the Pulitzer in 2018. Her second, is due out shortly.
Summary
This astounding collection starts with idiosyncratic reflections on Babel (Isaac, not Tower of), moves to Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, Uzbekistan, Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg while retracing Pushkin’s sojourn in the Caucasus. If you’ve ever wondered why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying, you’ll know after reading this book. Ms B seeks answers the big questions—love and the novel, the place of the individual in history, the existential distress of graduate students—by casting a fresh eye over the great Russian writers and what they had to say. The book is sad in parts but screamingly funny in plenty of others.
Writing
Ms B is beyond talented as a writer. She is masterly. Too clever for some, but what what they know?
Bottom line
Almost helplessly epigrammatical sums it up nicely. Will not be to everyone’s taste, but was to mine.
Footnote
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement, which is what distinguishes them from aphorisms and adages. Wikipedia said so.