The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Audible Audio Edition) Elif Batuman Penguin Audio Books
Download As PDF : The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Audible Audio Edition) Elif Batuman Penguin Audio Books
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 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-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 places 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.
Jacket Illustration © 2017 Roz Chast
The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Audible Audio Edition) Elif Batuman Penguin Audio Books
This book has everything-life imitating art, ice palaces, bad poetry and bad landladies in Uzbekistan, insane spouses of Russian novelists, and sardonic asides about Orhan Pamuk. Plus travelogues, literary theory and a justification of the life of literary study. I love everything this writer writes. Just read it.Product details
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The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Audible Audio Edition) Elif Batuman Penguin Audio Books Reviews
It's not too often that I read something that reminds me of grad school and makes me laugh out loud at the same time. Elif Batuman has managed the trick, though. Her adventures, and some of them really are adventures, in the world of Russian (and Uzbek) literature are related in a self-deprecating, insightful and really funny way. The chapter on Babel and on her studies in Uzbekistan are the ones that stand out in my mind. Anyone who is part of academia knows that it is a broad fellowship with many members, some of whom are strange and some of whom are just plain nuts. The Babel chapter shows this in a way both funny and sad. The Uzbekistan pieces really give the feeling of coming to terms and trying to study in a place that is completely alien and different from one's previous experiences. That sense of disorientation flows over into her study of Uzbek, which she notes seemed to have been created by Borges.
Definitely worth reading.
Batuman takes us on an engaging journey wandering through an insular graduate school program, an obsessive Tolstoy scholar retreat, and more, with plenty of laughs and big ideas to fuel the narrative engine along the way.
The 2 pieces titled Samarkand were interesting. They provided fascinating historical context to some of my favorite authors. The other stories, however, felt like I was reading the first draft of a memoir. Had little to do with the Russian authors and more to do with Elif Batuman's years as a student or something.
The impetus for writing springs from reading. Reading and writing are part of the same process. Robert D. Richardson in "First We Read Then We Write quotes Emerson""There is then the creative reading as well as creative writing.Emerson's method of archaeology devolves from first choosing the word and then constructing the sentence. In choosing the word, 'a writer needs to get in as close as possible to the thing itself.' Emerson insisted that 'words do not exist as things themselves, but stand for things which are finally more real than words.'(Richardson 49) This belief, of course, is a form of idealism; an idealism that flows from Plato through the German Idealists to Emerson.In idealism ideas alone are real; man thinks the world; man is the center and nature is a form of dream or spirit of man. Emerson wrote 'the Universe is the externalization of the soul.' When the poet writes he/she creates soul which gives birth to Nature.But first there is the reading and Emerson was a voracious reader, consuming anything and everything that fell within his reach. As Richardson notes he checked more books out of the library than he could read in the allotted time and we have a record of his charges to Boston Athenaeum, the Harvard College Library, and the Boston Society Library. From these records he read hundreds of books and of those books he re-read a favorite few over and over again.
I found myself thinking of Emerson and Richardson as I read Ms Batuman's book of essays about her adventures in reading, writing, and studying--first at Harvard and then at Stanford University. What becomes obvious is that she is passionately committed to language and reading and that her writing interests arise from her reading. She seems to be one of those persons whose reading becomes as important as everyday experience and colors and dominates the quotidian.As Cyril Connolly wrote "Words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." My sense of Ms Batuman is that she has purposed to focus her attention on a deep reading of books and life rather follow what she calls a path of mimetic desire. She explicitly states her theme at the end of her introduction "instead of moving to New York, living in a garret, self-publishing your poetry, writing book reviews, and having love affairs. . . .what if instead you went to Balzac's house, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him--and then started writing? That is the idea behind this book."
And a very good idea it is, too. As she leads us through her studies of Russian literature, we discover increasingly interesting connections that prove that real life is indeed stranger than fiction. Two examples illustrate her project's purpose in her chapter entitled "Babel in California," she recounts a find in her reading and researching of Babel's documents of a reference to a captured American pilot named Frank Mosher. Frank Mosher was an alias used by Captain Merian Caldwell Cooper, the creator and producer of the film King Kong. In the 20s he fought on the side of the White Russians and Poles against the Bolsheviks. With this information she finds a wealth of information that informs the making of the movie and its politics. In her final chapter, entitled "The Possessed," she uses her reading of Dostoevsky's Demons to explain one of the central ideas of the book that desire for the other is the impetus behind our need to be the other. She uses this psychological phenomena to explain certain writers' choice to not only write but the manner and method in which they write. "Don Quixote, it turns out, doesn't really want any of his ostensible objects; what he wants is to become one with his mediator Amadis of Gaul." (264) She continues by quoting René Girard, author of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, who believes "mimetic desire is the fundamental content of the Western novel." And who also concludes that this mimetic desire in fiction leads to conflict and ultimately transcendence. As Girard concludes "The hero sees himself in the rival he loathes; he renounces the 'differences' suggested by hatred."
Girard's thesis controls and supports the thesis of the book, which explains the conclusion. She writes"If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find it."
If you like literature and traveling, this book is for you. However, there is much more to this collection there is an almost metaphysical examination of writing, reading and their impetus. There is also the beginning of a trend; a whiff of the zeitgeist, signaling a change in the wind. In the world replete with escapist fiction and film, I feel a turning--a shift toward more serious subjects and a call for closer reading. As Coleridge once explained, there are four types of readers the hourglass, the sponge,the jelly-bag,and the Golconda. Ms Batuman is obviously the latter; a Golconda is the reader par excellence--a person who, like a "high-grader," the person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore.
I bought this book partially because of the cover. The cartoon is a HUGE clue that the book is going to be a different view of Russian lit. Batuman loves Russian literature for some of the same reasons I do. An outsider would say it makes no sense that's where our interests lie, but that's what's great about literature. You never know when a type or genre or style will appeal to you.
Some of the reviews here complain about the book being quirky or not serious enough. But if you think a serious work of Russian scholarship will have a cartoon cover--you've got your head up your butt!
The book is fun and offbeat and more of a memoir of a woman who's compelled to follow an odd academic path that anything else. It's for people who have a sense of humor as well as of the absurd.
Funny, insightful, super articulate, often hilarious, her characters behavior really can be explained in 19th C Russian terms..Of course I love Dostoevsky and Checkhov. Wish I'd been in grad school with Batuman!
An ironic, at times borderline sardonic, alienated view of life & literature. The author loves her study subjects and love interests a little bit like, to rephrase P. G. Wodehouse, "a mother loves a half witted child". The way she recounts works by Navoi and especially Dostoyevsky doesn't leave a shadow of a doubt in your mind about these being written by major loons. As a Dostoyevsky hater, I experienced something of a Schadenfreude kind of pleasure reading it "Take it, Fedya!" I would say forget the classics, read Elif, learn something and be entertained.
This book has everything-life imitating art, ice palaces, bad poetry and bad landladies in Uzbekistan, insane spouses of Russian novelists, and sardonic asides about Orhan Pamuk. Plus travelogues, literary theory and a justification of the life of literary study. I love everything this writer writes. Just read it.
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