The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them [Paperback]

Elif Batuman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 16, 2010

One of The Economist’s 2011 Books of the Year

 

THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED—ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!—TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS

No one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.

Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 précis 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. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years (Dallas Morning News), Batuman's intriguing blend of travelogue, autobiography, and literary criticism offers a fresh perspective on some of Russia's greatest authors. Despite its challenging subject matter, The Possessed is accessible and entertaining, written with sly humor and a keen eye for absurdity. Some critics considered its essays uneven, but they still praised Batuman's infectious delight in literature and her examination of the many ways we can live lives more attuned to our favorite books. Perhaps the New York Times said it best: "She's the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374532184
• ISBN-13: 978-0374532185
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Books & Reading > General

More About the Author

Elif Batuman was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She now lives in San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She teaches at Stanford University.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 145 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Young Turk March 2, 2010

By Jeffrey Teich

Format:Paperback

Please be patient. I will get to the book in a moment, but first I want to explain why this very good book matters.

My Polish grandmother was an austere, white-haired woman perpetually irked by her descent into the middle class. She believed that a lady rightfully avoided certain things such as work and cooking. She was, however, a great reader and had at one time aspired to be a poet. A sheaf of her poems written in a florid Slavic hand lies packed away in my basement. When I was thirteen, my mother pointed me in my grandmother's direction and instructed me to ask Grandma what to read. "You must begin", the old lady said firmly, "with Tolstoy. Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata." At the time I couldn't understand either and settled on "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" Since then I have had a recurring love affair with Russian lit. From Gogol and Pushkin I journeyed on through Dostoevsky and got as far as Master and Margarita. Nearly every step of the way some Russian emigre -the very people who insisted I read these books- wagged a cautionary finger at me: "You will never truly understand a word of this. The translation is terrible. And the Russian soul is... beyond you.""

Now I have discovered The Possessed. This book with its comic-inspired cover lay in the Our Staff Recommends section of the bookstore, in a rack nine deep and quite undisturbed. So, hopeful that I would at last grasp the essence of the Russian soul or at least learn something, I bought it. Once I began to read, I couldn't put it down. Nor could I stop laughing. Elif Batuman has written a comic detective story in which the characters real and imaginary intermix and the revelation lies in the journey itself. Yet she knows so much more than Russian lit. She glides effortlessly across the artistic landscape from Babel to King Kong, from Tolstoy to Sammarkand. She is a keen tracer of lost personae. But there's more. Ms. Batuman has the delicate antennae needed to detect the nuances of academic silliness. She comes armed with a red-blooded aversion to the cult of pomp and obfuscation which dominates so much of modern scholarship. Better than that she comes armed with a facility for writing English which pleases the American soul.

But she is also a teacher. In her deft way she touches on the central themes of Russian literature which has thrived despite the successive ogreships of the tsars, the communists, and now the Putinists. What are the central themes? According to her (and others) the Russian must lead at least two lives and perhaps three or more. At minimum there coexist the public persona, the private one, and the inner one that carries on a dialogue only with itself. But don't we all have these? Here's the difference: Many a Russian author reveals this multiple existence through his/her work and thereby risks the brutal perils of self-incrimination. Add to that a rich broth of mysticism and magic, and you nearly have it. Neither Raskolnikov nor Rasputin came about entirely by accident.

This book is not without its occasional flaws. So what. The stories are fun anyway.

I am not quite all the way through The Possessed. A handful of pages to go. I will finish it tonight or tomorrow; and when I do, I will have to fight off the chagrin of ending. Like Pimen in Boris Godunov I will say: Yet one more tale.

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Yeah sure, it sucks that there is no kindle edition, but it's a great read otherwise... February 22, 2010

By Duy Tran

Format:Paperback

Really, this series of essays lived up to the billing. First off, this book is downright funny, especially the series of essays "Summer in Samarkand," and the exaggerated retelling of the history of the Ice Palace. Ms. Satuman has a great feel for deadpan humor and comic understatement.

Second, it's a "smart" book and full of theory: some elegant, some comicly half-baked, and some straight-up weird. The last essay on Girard's theory of mimetic desire is incredibly interesting stuff, even though I didn't believe a word of it.

Third, it's personal, I felt like the book really revealed the personality of the author, and that I knew her well.

37 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is hilarious, and can make you smarter, too! March 29, 2010

By Not So Old

Format:Paperback

I have lived a long time and read a lot of books. Some were totally trashy and probably made me dumber, but they were totally engrossing. Other books were a much tougher slog, but they usually improved my knowledge of some subject and sometimes inspired a better overall understanding of my own (long) life.

This book is unlike anything my eyes have ever seen. First and foremost, it is absolutely hilarious. Reading this book was as fun and addictive as watching the first season of Jersey Shore ("GTL: Grad School, Travel, Literature.") Except, each passing chapter gave my brain the sensation of a bounteous feast, instead of giving it brain-ulcers. That is, the book not only increased my knowledge of familiar and unfamiliar books from Russia and elsewhere, but it also made me think about such books, and my own life, in new ways. By combining personal insight and wisdom, literary theory, and a body of grueling journalistic service (visiting "Slap-in-the-Face," squatting or leaping over pits in Samarkand, depending on the type of pit) the author really provoked a lot of things for me to think about.

Like, "to what extent is the goal of controlling your own life achievable, or even desirable?" Most people would like to control, at least partially, what happens to them, i.e. to minimize slaps in the face. But, do you also want to control what you like or love, and is this even possible? On the one hand, the heart is supposed to want what it wants. On the other hand Woody Allen has been viewed, to some extent, as a nasty pedophile. Probably what you love is controlled by your own outlook and personality, in the sense that you want yourself to want certain things (like a crush where you love to love someone) according to your interests and world-view. On the other hand, why do you want yourself to want certain things? This comes down to your life and experiences, which are partly under your own control or responsibility, but are partly determined by the actions of other humans in the world, grappling with the same apparatus.

This is one example of the sort of train of thought that my brain did not expect to take upon reading about some grad students and Russians. The book is truly unique in genre and content--if you read it you will have your own variety of thoughts. It is certainly possible that you will not like the book as much! For instance, if you don't feel that what you love has much control over the rest of your life, or that it should, then maybe this book will make you really mad. Or, if you feel like it is inappropriate to make jokes or to learn about crazy ancient things, or to use literary theory, when there is poverty in like Haiti, or because 9/11 and some associated wars happened, then it will be hard for you to enjoy many of these essays. Finally, the author is evidently a lively young talented babe, so if you feel that people should only learn from the lives and thoughts of older men with distinguished personas and grave attitudes, then you should ignore this book.

Having characterized the least-ideal audience for this book as loveless, humorless, and sexist, let me emphasize my opinion that almost everyone will at least enjoy this book even if it doesn't explode their brain. Now, the author is definitely honest about her experiences and opinions, many of which will necessarily differ from people who are not six-feet tall first-generation-Turkish women from New Jersey. This is _personal_ story. So if she says, for instance, that creative writing workshops are a big problem for her, it doesn't mean you are stupid if you are or were in a creative writing workshop--it may feel that way because she is smart and funny, but the book does not ridicule anything, it is just ridiculously funny. I mean, how could she develop this feeling about creative writing workshops unless she was in them herself? Did you know, when Tolstoy thought of the idea for _Anna Karenina_ the point was to totally rip her? And then as he was writing more and more about what was originally supposed to be a fatuous, selfish, bourgeois woman, he was like, "this is my own life!" My point is that even if you tried to write an objective world account about, like, "Modern Islamic Thought," you will ultimately be including your own experiences. And if you are honest about your likes and dislikes, the result will be all the more warm and humane.

In summary, the author is really smart but not a punk. I think that almost everyone will enjoy this book, and hopefully you will even enjoy it as much as I did!