The Possessed
Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Ratings6
Average rating4.1
15
Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Ratings6
Average rating4.1
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
I thought this book would be mainly literary analysis of Russian authors, but it is actually more of a memoir/travelogue of the author's graduate study. And it was quite entertaining! She writes with such a deadpan sense of humor about her travels and how they relate to her studies that I found myself carried along through the book and learning something about the authors and books along the way.
It's a hard book to categorize because it isn't strictly a travel memoir, nor is it a scholarly analysis of Russian literature. However, I would say that I'm more likely to read some of these Russian authors simply because I was intrigued by the little-known facts and history surrounding their writing, all developed by this author in this book.
