The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
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- ISBN13: 9780374532185
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 Ancient Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Like and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Factually and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the huge questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the fantastic Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and amusing tales of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
Batuman searches for the answers to the huge questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the fantastic Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and amusing tales of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
“Odd and oddly profound . . . Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, amusing way of describing the people around her . . . Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer though—beyond her cool, lapidary prose—is the winsome and communicable delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty. She’s the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she’s feeling.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, nearly impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, erudition and life. Although bounded by the leader’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“It’s not surprising that some people never get over these books, and Batuman, for her part, goes to get a Ph.D. in Russian literature. Meanwhile, she travels through a country just poignant and absurd enough to showcase her capacious sense of humor (which has room for Isaac Babel, romantic mishaps, and missing luggage) . . . The main attraction is Elif Batuman herself.”—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
“Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable, The Possessed is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the leader, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have finished up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. As a replacement for, she has made her theme glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place.”—Liesel Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
“Batuman writes with superb wit . . . There’s something melancholy, as well as gorgeous, in using literature not just to illuminate experience but really to make it. Batuman’s writing waltzes in a space in which books and life reflect each additional. The effect is dizzying sometimes, and maybe that’s one of her points; her roving sensibility deliriously encompasses many styles and moods. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted like child might have written this book.”—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“For Batuman, the Russian classics are a prism through which we can examine our own lives, whose close study might just lead us toward unlocking what she describes as ‘the riddle of human behavior and the scenery of like.’”—Peter Terzian, The Boston Globe
“A hugely engaging mix of scholarly spelunking . . . and devious personal revelation . . . Batuman, a gifted and nearly painfully amusing raconteur, encounters literary royalty and astronomer kings, as well as many epically borderline personalities who attend literary conferences. As it turns out, investigating how the lives of the masters informed their art leads to the revelation that oftentimes, it’s art that gives shape to life.”—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“I’m no fantastic partisan of the Russian novel . . . So when I rave to you, dear readers, about Elif Batuman’s hilarious and charming The Possessed, know that the leader has entirely bewitched me despite my relative indifference to her theme. Ten pages in, I already knew I’d read her on pretty much anything. Which is not to say that The Possessed failed to enlighted me about both Russian books and the people who adore them . . . I’m hooked.”—Laura Miller, Salon
“Wonderfully grotesque, like a cross between Borges and Borat . . . Shows how the life of literary erudition is really lived—at its most ridiculous, and at its most unexpectedly sublime.”—Adam Kirsch, Slate
“If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that when you hear ‘Russian literature,’ you reflect of college classes you wish you’d cut—and books that can seem as long as a Siberian winter. But in this delightful debut, Elif Batuman makes you look at Russian literature from a fresh perspective, using an unusual blend of memoir and travelogue as she delves into lives and personalities of such Russian literary giants as Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy.”—Scott Martel, Cleveland Unadorned Dealer
“A rare gem: a genuine avowal of deep reading—of caring about thoughts and being carried of by them—from an exceptional writer who’s not event 35.”—SF Weekly
“It’s not regularly that one laughs out loud while reading a book of literary criticism. In seven delightfully odd essays that combine travelogue and memoir with criticism, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed takes us on an unconventional odyssey through the world of Russian literature . . . Part sleuth, part pundit, Batuman both plays the game of literary exegesis and skewers it.”—Christian Science Monitor
“Possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years . . . By writing about her personal experiences with such charm, Batuman manages to make literature accessible in a way few critics can: She likes the Russians, and because, over the course of the book, you come to like her a small bit, you come to like the Russians as well. She’s an example of not just how to appreciate literature, but how to live life through literature—lacking losing yourself.”—Dallas Morning News
“While some parts of the essays read like spy thrillers, others are more like episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with literary stealing one another’s parking spaces …
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Hi. I read the NY Times review of this book and thought, “Oh yummy” and went immediately to Amazon to Kindle it…and it is not available on Kindle. C’mon publishers! Get with Kindle!
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This is a WONDERFUL book that is finally available in a Kindle edition.
Perfectly written, entertaining, insightful, and all the excellent things a book like this should be. It makes me want to become a graduate student in Russian literature, and that from a geologist and science teacher! Every excellent thing I read about this book in reviews is right. 
P.S. I do make an apology to the leader, who is clever, smart, and all things literarily wonderful, for griping in my earlier “review” about the lack of a Kindle edition. Posting a review is an ’simple’ way to communicate to a publisher, who ostensibly pays some sort of attention to the sales and reviews of its authors’ books. And, theoretically at least, the reader of reviews is able to discern that complaining about the lack of a Kindle edition is not the same as reviewing the actual book. I like books, but I only buy them now when I absolutely HAVE to, as much for ecological reasons as anything. I reflect electronic editions are more cost-effectively friendly, and that matters to me.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is a memoir from a woman still in her early thirties, and it suffers from the limited experience and perspective of such a young self-protagonist. The leader is a Turkish language Turkish-American who chose to study Russian literature, and therefore needed to learn Russian. The book is ostensibly about her experiences in pursuit of her goals.
While the book opens with Babel, closes with Dostoevsky, and has a honest shot of Tolstoy and Chekhov in between, more than a third of the book is about her time in Samarkand learning Uzbek. Batuman is excellent enough writer, but neither her experiences nor her insights on Russian literature are enough to carry a nearly 300 page book. I can seen where pieces of this book may have made excellent essays in their earlier magazine incarnations, but the whole is too long for the material and inspiration, and ends up dragging.
The back take in asserts: “If you’re going to read just one book about talks preparation, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boy’s 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!!!” So the question may be how many people need to read even one such book. With a 35 year interest in Russian literature I guess I felt a need to read it. But if you don’t have a hard-core interest in the theme I wouldn’t recommend this book. It’s not one to draw you in to a like of the theme. That’s why, as much as I leaned toward four stars initially, I finished up giving it three stars. Unless you just know this is a book you need to read, you probably won’t find it an engrossing.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I bought this book with high expectations, but they were not fulfilled.
Three of the six chapters concern Ms. Batuman’s summer in Samarkand. A few years after her return, an Uzbek friend sent her the book she had been looking for. She could no longer read it, she tells us, but then she realized “that I didn’t really have to read the book, that the book didn’t work that way, but rather by being kicked, or addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, either of which was much less time-consuming than poring through the densely typed pages. . . .”
Just as she really didn’t have to try know her Uzbek neighbors, their history, beliefs, culture, and customs; their hopes, their worries, the ways they see the world. Samarkand, an out-of-the-way place with an-out-of-the-way literature (her words), was as a replacement for the backdrop for the last adventure of her youth.
The first chapter prefigures the Samarkand tale, with a talks on the writer Babel as the exotic locale and Babel scholars the object of humor (or ridicule).
The title chapter deserves the praise heaped on the book as a whole. The third is filled with appealing information. But I establish the rest rather shallow and missing in empathy.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I’m with Ancient Turveydrop – why not read a book that got a fantastic review, a book about books, in the form of…a book!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5