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3.5 

The Possessed

By Elif Batuman
The Possessed by Elif Batuman digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year

From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.

No one who read 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.

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44 Reviews

3.5
“This book is not at all what I inferred from the title and I was disappointed by that--the raging literary crush I have on Batuman was probably the single most helpful factor in me finishing it still. I had a much easier time following along once I saw others refer to this a bundle of travel memoirs. I don't know if I would have picked it up if I'd known that from the start, Batuman or not. Regardless, her prose gives the strange feeling that the world she inhabits is beyond absurd, though you're never really sure because she never calls it out explicitly. And that everyone is in on it, including you, the reader. It's almost dissociative in style and for that alone DNF was never an option.”
Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes“After reading The Idiot and Either/Or, I was hooked by Batuman's dry, investigative writing style. Written in-part as a piece of academic comparative literature, and also a personal travel-diary, Elif draws memorizing scenes from the somewhat banal circumstances of Russian literature studies. We follow her through Uzbekistan, Russia and Italy and learn a great deal about the history of these places, and the present day people who carry these histories. I am continually impressed by Batuman's authentic style of writing, and personal confessional-style honesty: even if it takes some effort to push through all the necessary detail to get there. I leave you with one of my favourite lines from the book: "When you studied [a language], u weren't learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographical location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked."”

About Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novels Either/Or, The Idiot, and the nonfiction book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

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