50
Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books
Cart |
|  my account  |  wish list  |  help   |  800-878-7323
Hello, | Login
MENU
  • Browse
    • New Arrivals
    • Bestsellers
    • Featured Preorders
    • Award Winners
    • Audio Books
    • See All Subjects
  • Used
  • Staff Picks
    • Staff Picks
    • Picks of the Month
    • 50 Books for 50 Years
    • 25 Best 21st Century Sci-Fi & Fantasy
    • 25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books From the 21st Century
    • 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Women to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books to Read Before You Die
  • Gifts
    • Gift Cards & eGift Cards
    • Powell's Souvenirs
    • Journals and Notebooks
    • socks
    • Games
  • Sell Books
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Find A Store

PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Review-a-Day

The Possessed

by Review-a-Day, May 21, 2010 12:00 AM
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read ThemThe Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

Reviewed by Benjamin Moser

Harper's Magazine

If you're perusing this magazine, chances are you went through a "Russian phase": that period when a curious, intellectually ambitious young reader, primed to enter literary adulthood, finally takes up Crime and Punishment or War and Peace. In The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman recalls her own adolescent encounter with Tolstoy. "Anna Karenina was a perfect book, with an otherworldly perfection: unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a super-charged gray zone between nature and culture. How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?"

It's not surprising that some people never get over these books, and Batuman, for her part, goes on to get a Ph.D. in Russian literature. Meanwhile, she travels through a country just poignant and absurd enough to showcase her capacious sense of humor (which has room for Isaac Babel, romantic mishaps, and missing luggage). She fields questions from nationalist zealots ("Why is St. Patrick's Day so widely celebrated in Moscow . . . when nobody in Scotland knows a thing about Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg?" one fanatic demands); turns up at Yasnaya Polyana in sweatpants to regale "International Tolstoy Scholars" with a harebrained theory that Tolstoy was murdered; and spends a summer in Samarkand in a desperate attempt to enhance her post-grad-school CV by learning Uzbek (Batuman is Turkish-American, and the Uzbek language is a close relative of Turkish).

Her dedicated teachers are two patient Uzbeks paid a pittance to introduce her to their literature ("Was it my heart—a bird—that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night, or was it bats of some kind?") and culture ("In English we have an expression: 'like a bull in a china shop,'" Batuman tells her teacher. "That's how Genghis Khan was--but even worse," the teacher answers). The dull pewter of Uzbekistan's literary offerings makes Russia's great names seem all the more lustrous, but this book is only secondarily about literature: its main attraction is Elif Batuman herself.

Benjamin Moser is a contributing editor of Harper's magazine and the author of Why This World.




{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##

Most Read

  1. Best Fiction of 2020 by Powell's Books
  2. 25 Books to Read Before You Die: 21st Century by Powell's Staff
  3. Midyear Roundup 2021: The Best Books of the Year (So Far) by Powell's Staff
  4. The 11 Best Places to Read by Will Schwalbe
  5. 25 Books to Read Before You Die: Pacific Northwest Edition by Powell's Staff

Blog Categories

  • Interviews
  • Original Essays
  • Lists
  • Q&As
  • Playlists
  • Portrait of a Bookseller
  • City of Readers
  • Required Reading
  • Powell's Picks Spotlight

Post a comment:

*Required Fields
Name*
Email*
  1. Please note:
  2. All comments require moderation by Powells.com staff.
  3. Comments submitted on weekends might take until Monday to appear.
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram

  • Help
  • Guarantee
  • My Account
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Security
  • Wish List
  • Partners
  • Contact Us
  • Shipping
  • Sitemap
  • © 2022 POWELLS.COM Terms