The Possessed

The Possessed, subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, is kind of a hodgepodge of a book. Mostly it's a memoir by the author, Elif Batuman, and her experiences studying Russian literature. At times it's very entertaining in a droll fashion, but overall I wasn't enthralled with it.

Perhaps this is because I have never read any Russian novels. The only Russian literature I've read are the plays of Chekhov, and though he is mentioned here it's only in terms of his short stories (by this book one wouldn't know he wrote plays). Batuman doesn't assume she's writing to an audience that knows what she's talking about--in the last chapter, there's a lengthy plot summary of Dostoevsky's novel Demons--but having never experienced the sensation of Russian novels I felt at a distance.

Also, I'm not sure Batuman is as funny as she thinks she is. There are several whimsical descriptions of her experiences in grad school and at conferences--at one she arrives only to find that her luggage is missing, and so has to attend her panel discussion in sweatpants and flip-flops. There is a detailed anatomy of a relationship with a charismatic Croatian student, but it wasn't all that interesting. I am amazed at some of the peripatetic lives these people lead, though: "[He] fell in love with a girl who was obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately, determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to annihilate himself in the process. He got the girl, for a time, but they drove each other mad, quite literally. She ran away to Ljubljana. He followed her. She rushed to the top floor of her hotel and tried to throw herself from a window. Realizing he was on the verge of destroying both her and himself, Matej fled to Venice, holed himself up in a pension, and decided to read every book Nietzsche had ever written."

As for the discussion of Russian literature, the book is not really any kind of guide to them, and if one wanted that sort of thing it would be best to look elsewhere. She does make a nice contrast between contemporary American fiction and the Russian writers of the nineteenth century, particularly on how they use names. She mentions that the title canine in Chekhov's story "The Lady and the Lapdog" was unnamed, and in italics points out that "no contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog."

The best part of the book is the recounting of a summer she spent in Uzbekistan, learning the local language. It is here that her writing is strongest, and this reader understood exactly why the book had been written. I feel like I'm ready should I ever need to go to Samarkand. The grad school stuff seems like inside baseball, though I was amused by this realization: "So he would abandon his PhD--so what? Who had ever described grad school as the summit of human happiness? Wasn't it presumptuous to assume that every smart young person in the world could reach self-fulfillment only by going to Stanford to participate in Hegel seminars?"

This book made several top-ten lists for 2010, and while it is sparklingly written, it took me a good while to get through its 280 pages. Perhaps a more specialized reader is required.