The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Follow the Reader
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them BY Elif Batuman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paperback, 304 pages. $xv.
The most gifted essayists are often but brilliant storytellers. Such is the case with Elif Batuman in her debut collection, The Possessed. A teacher at Stanford University, she has published some of this piece of work in the New Yorker, n+ane, and Harper'south. Rather boldly for a tyro essayist, Batuman employs a outset-person fashion, enriched with dialogue, characters, superb pacing, and sizzling rhetoric. It'due south easy to imagine what a sharp and engaging lecturer she is—if, as her introduction has it, she has indeed "stopped assertive that 'theory' had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you lot loved by studying it.… Wasn't the point of dearest that information technology made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?"
Batuman is possessed, not merely by Russian literature but by all the side streets, back alleys, and hugger-mugger passageways she uncovers. She tries to find out whether Tolstoy was murdered; searches for Isaac Boom-boom's last living relatives, who are lost at San Francisco International Airport; and endures winter in Saint Petersburg to touch an ice palace with her own hands. Such escapades, anecdotes, and accidents sometimes don't mix with her penchant for philosophical quandaries and literary theory. Simply Batuman'due south classroom experience pays off here, as she mostly presents these weighty matters with sense of humor, sensuality, and concision—framing ideas without condescension or jargon:
I am reminded of an anecdote almost the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca. Walking along a deserted road one night, the story goes, Nasreddin Hoca noticed a troop of horsemen riding toward him. Filled with terror that they might rob him or conscript him into the ground forces, Nasreddin leaped over a nearby wall and found himself in a graveyard. The horsemen, who were in fact ordinary travelers, were interested by this behavior, so they rode up to the wall and looked over to see Hoca lying motionless on the ground.
"Tin we assistance you?" the travelers asked. "What are you lot doing here?"
"Well," Nasreddin Hoca replied, "it's more complicated than you retrieve. You see, I'g here considering of you; and you're hither considering of me." …
This story encapsulates the riddle of gratuitous will in homo history: a realm where, as Friedrich Engels observed, gratuitous wills are constantly obstructing one another so that, inevitably, "what emerges is something that no one willed." Nobody, least of all Nasreddin Hoca, willed for Nasreddin Hoca to end upward lying in the graveyard that nighttime. Nobody forced him there, either—yet in that location he was.
Within the first thirty pages of The Possessed, it becomes clear that meticulous, perhaps fifty-fifty obsessive inquiry has gone into details that are consequent, and consistently gripping, throughout. But while some parts of the essays read like spy thrillers, others are more like episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with academics stealing ane some other'due south parking spaces and then giving the finger. In one scene, Nathalie Babel (Isaac's daughter) fixes her gaze on a professor across the dinner table and demands to know whether it'due south true that the professor despises her, while the professor accused of despising stubbornly refuses to say that she does not.
Batuman writes not only for people who love Russian literature but as well for those who didn't know they practise. Her descriptions of the working conditions of literary geniuses are so compelling that readers will experience amore for War and Peace fifty-fifty without having read it. Batuman couples a curiosity well-nigh the earth with a respect for people, places, and their stories. This fresh worldview informs a critical approach that doesn't rely on a smirk to audio savvy. Batuman at times piles on the telling details too thickly, suggesting that Babel'southward "The Enkindling" was the inspiration for King Kong. But readers quickly forgive such excessiveness as further show of her generosity and enthusiasm—a welcome contagion for her readers in the sterile realm of contemporary criticism.
Maybe the drove's most highly-seasoned characteristic is its beautifully turned prose. Practiced writing means knowing when to stop and let the reader savor the moment, and Batuman tin can demonstrate a sure paw on the brake: "[Dostoyevsky] made a three-day trip to the famous casino of Homburg, which in fact dragged on for x days, during which he lost not only all his coin merely also his sentinel, then that afterwards, he and his wife never knew what time it was."
The Possessed reveals the riddles of genius in everyday experience and in common things, such every bit when the author describes Tolstoy's fascination with the bicycle: "He took his first lesson exactly ane month after the death of his and Sonya's love youngest son. Both the bicycle and an introductory lesson were a gift from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. One can but guess how Sonya felt, in her mourning, to run across her married man teetering forth the garden paths." Batuman does what all smashing essayists do—she fills her readers with a passion for the subject area at hand while simultaneously exploring its complexity.
Simon Van Booy's story collection Love Begins in Winter (Harper Perennial, 2009) was awarded the International Frank O'Connor Prize.
Source: https://www.bookforum.com/print/1605/the-possessed-adventures-with-russian-books-and-the-people-who-read-them-by-elif-batuman-5012
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