DA NYTIMES
THE POSSESSED
Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
By Elif Batuman
296 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.
Excerpt: ‘The Possessed’ (February 17, 2010) “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?” Ms. Batuman asks. “All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits — of omitting needless words.”
Books of The Times
Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession
By DWIGHT GARNER
Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, “The Possessed,” she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft.
Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.
And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?
Ms. Batuman is a young writer whose family background is Turkish, not Russian. Born in New York City, she grew up in New Jersey before graduating from Harvard and earning a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford. Her career, thus far, has seemed blessed. Her first piece of journalism, a profile of a former Thai kickboxing champion, ran in The New Yorker. The longish essays in “The Possessed” first appeared in that magazine, as well as in Harper’s and n+1.
In one of these essays, Ms. Batuman delivers a paper at a Tolstoy conference in Russia. In another, she picks up Babel’s daughter for a conference at Stanford. In yet another, she travels to Uzbekistan to learn its language. Each of these essays unfolds both comically and intellectually, as if Ms. Batuman were channeling Janet Malcolm by way of Woody Allen.
Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her. One professor’s mustache and mobile eyebrows give him “the air of a 19th-century philanderer.” A boyfriend steps off an airplane looking “as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy.” Even the Tolstoy scholar who becomes incontinent on a chartered bus trip and refuses to throw out his soiled pants becomes, in her hands, a comic figure out of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Ms. Batuman lets her opinions fly freely. She describes feeling “deeply, viscerally bored” by an Orhan Pamuk novel. About reporting on Turkey for a Let’s Go guidebook, she bemoans the “exasperating 20th-century discourse of ‘shoestring travel.’ ”
She explains: “The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of ‘sticking it to the man’ to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls.” About trying to secure academic grant money, she writes, “Translation jobs always made me want to jump out a window.”
Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer, though — beyond her calm, lapidary prose — is the winsome and infectious 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.
About Chekhov’s story “Lady With Lapdog,” Ms. Batuman writes, “I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives — one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other ‘running its course in secret’ — and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold the most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one.”
She describes two historical types of Uzbek writers: “the aristocrats, who loved beautiful women, nature and kings; and the democrats, who loved mud and head colds.”
Her defense of literary theory is lovely. “I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”
Ms. Batuman is almost helplessly epigrammatical (“Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you”), and it’s tempting to keep quoting from her book forever. There are moments in “The Possessed” where Ms. Batuman loses the threads of the stories she’s trying to tell, moments where plot summary or historical précis drag on too long. But these data-dump moments are rare.
Elif Batuman is clearly one of those people whom Babel described, in one of his Odessa stories, as having “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Her autumnal impulses are balanced by jumpy, satirical ones. It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder.
THE POSSESSED
Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
By Elif Batuman
296 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.
Excerpt: ‘The Possessed’ (February 17, 2010) “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?” Ms. Batuman asks. “All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits — of omitting needless words.”
Books of The Times
Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession
By DWIGHT GARNER
Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, “The Possessed,” she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft.
Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.
And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?
Ms. Batuman is a young writer whose family background is Turkish, not Russian. Born in New York City, she grew up in New Jersey before graduating from Harvard and earning a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford. Her career, thus far, has seemed blessed. Her first piece of journalism, a profile of a former Thai kickboxing champion, ran in The New Yorker. The longish essays in “The Possessed” first appeared in that magazine, as well as in Harper’s and n+1.
In one of these essays, Ms. Batuman delivers a paper at a Tolstoy conference in Russia. In another, she picks up Babel’s daughter for a conference at Stanford. In yet another, she travels to Uzbekistan to learn its language. Each of these essays unfolds both comically and intellectually, as if Ms. Batuman were channeling Janet Malcolm by way of Woody Allen.
Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her. One professor’s mustache and mobile eyebrows give him “the air of a 19th-century philanderer.” A boyfriend steps off an airplane looking “as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy.” Even the Tolstoy scholar who becomes incontinent on a chartered bus trip and refuses to throw out his soiled pants becomes, in her hands, a comic figure out of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Ms. Batuman lets her opinions fly freely. She describes feeling “deeply, viscerally bored” by an Orhan Pamuk novel. About reporting on Turkey for a Let’s Go guidebook, she bemoans the “exasperating 20th-century discourse of ‘shoestring travel.’ ”
She explains: “The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of ‘sticking it to the man’ to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls.” About trying to secure academic grant money, she writes, “Translation jobs always made me want to jump out a window.”
Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer, though — beyond her calm, lapidary prose — is the winsome and infectious 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.
About Chekhov’s story “Lady With Lapdog,” Ms. Batuman writes, “I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives — one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other ‘running its course in secret’ — and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold the most important, interesting, and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one.”
She describes two historical types of Uzbek writers: “the aristocrats, who loved beautiful women, nature and kings; and the democrats, who loved mud and head colds.”
Her defense of literary theory is lovely. “I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”
Ms. Batuman is almost helplessly epigrammatical (“Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you”), and it’s tempting to keep quoting from her book forever. There are moments in “The Possessed” where Ms. Batuman loses the threads of the stories she’s trying to tell, moments where plot summary or historical précis drag on too long. But these data-dump moments are rare.
Elif Batuman is clearly one of those people whom Babel described, in one of his Odessa stories, as having “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Her autumnal impulses are balanced by jumpy, satirical ones. It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder.
