The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Like lots of narcissists (I know: too-vogue a term), Elif seems like she's a nice person. Therein ends my interest in this text. Wow: who let her DIARY out? This never should have been published. Only her friends and her therapist'd be interested in this fluff and twaddle. And I read half of The Idiot. Who the devil are these millennial sillies like Batumen and Sally Rooney? They sure ain't WRITERS. Typical safe MFA program musing. Nothing in the least profound or moving. I'm sorry I bought this. Gonna donate it to a library or a rubbish bin.

An ironic, at times borderline sardonic, alienated view of life & literature. The author loves her study subjects and love interests a little bit like, to rephrase P. G. Wodehouse, "a mother loves a half witted child". The way she recounts works by Navoi and especially Dostoyevsky doesn't leave a shadow of a doubt in your mind about these being written by major loons. As a Dostoyevsky hater, I experienced something of a Schadenfreude kind of pleasure reading it: "Take it, Fedya!" I would say forget the classics, read Elif, learn something and be entertained.

This is a book about people who read books and study Russian authors. I can’t explain it. But it’s a story from a smart, great and funny and insightful and honest storyteller about stories and storytellers we may otherwise pass through. The stories she uses to bring stories to life from Babel to The Black Monk … you can’t know what to expect entering this book of experiences but I found it a fun read that exposed me to Russian lit in a way that made it human and 3 dimensional.

It’s a fun to read memoir, suitable for contemporary hurried readers. Batuman paints vivid pictures of life on the campus and life of scholars pursuing their subject overseas. She certainly has some interesting ideas about motivations of Russian writers and people who read them today. Just as long as a reader remembers that this is a memoir and not a study of Russian literature, there is a lot to learn from this book - about strange meanderings of human mind. The most captivating passages for me were about a Croatian student who became a monk and the chapter on a visit to Tolstoy’s birthplace.

Finding the treasure that is Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, made my summer. Humor in writing is a longed-for attribute. Her’s is the kind of narrative that makes the reader say to any human close by, “Hey, listen to this,” followed by laughter. Read this book.

The author can certainly spin a funny tale and this book is populated with offbeat crazed individuals which makes for many a memorable anecdote leavened with some interesting historical insights. But the book just does not hang together and the entire last chapter should have been edited out. I enjoyed the book, enjoyed the author, but closed the cover feeling unsatisfied.

This book has everything-life imitating art, ice palaces, bad poetry and bad landladies in Uzbekistan, insane spouses of Russian novelists, and sardonic asides about Orhan Pamuk. Plus travelogues, literary theory and a justification of the life of literary study. I love everything this writer writes. Just read it.

One of the funniest memoirs I've ever read! Ideal for literary folks amused by the absurd. After finishing it, I immediately bought her novel, which I'm enjoying now.

I, Melachi ibn Amillar, being of unsound mind and body, did read Elif Batuman's "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" (2010) in April 2013. The book gives an account of her travels, acquaintances and readings while enrolled on a postgraduate course on literature and languages in California. If that sounds a little odd, well so is the book, ranging from Stanford to Turkey to Uzbekistan and Saint Petersburg. Now, the central question, or joke, of the book is posed on page 57: "As a six-foot-tall first generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew." I, Melachi, have not read as much Russian literature as Ms Batuman, but have slept with more Russian women than her. Or so one imagines. But why, in short, would anyone care what I, or Elif Batuman, has to say about Russian literature? Perhaps cognizant of the answer to this, we are instead treated to the tragi-comic travails of jetsetting academics, in the manner of a David Lodge. Oddly, the narrator does not seem at all possessed -- she will go anywhere and do anything, providing she can get a grant. I assume there is some real scholarship going on as well, though, perhaps mercifully, we are spared this. As a travelogue with a linguistic bent it is interesting in parts, though rather haphazard. There are no cats in the book. There is a long section at the end about mimeticism involving a summary of the entire plot of "The Possessed" (the Russian novel, already rather well-known, I would have thought), the characters of which she seems to compare to those of her classmates, which I did not quite get.But the strange thing about the book lies in the writing style. Just as the academics are portrayed as obsessed by their topics, when they clearly are not, the chapters are littered with bizarre statements that look as though they might be clever or amusing, but in fact are just strange. It is as though the text were translated from a Turkish original full of untranslatable wordplay. The style is so remorseless that it develops an horrific charm of its own. "I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years -- it took the experience of lived time -- to realize that they really are the same thing." (p.10). Quite. "[they] disinfected and bandaged his knee in a visibly efficient fashion." (p. 14). Not invisibly? And this splendid non-sequitur, on which I pondered deeply: "He had been chased several kilometers cross-country by a wild dog. He must be the kind of man who likes women, I remember thinking." (p.15). And: "'little feet'... Pushkin is not here referring... to his own feet. Nonetheless, I saw a pair of Pushkin's boots once in a museum, and they were very small." (p.89). "The gypsy looked at my palm and told me to beware of a woman called Mary ." (p. 91). Mary? "In Moscow, for the first and last [last?] time in my life, I dated bankers. Things didn't work out with the first banker [pray tell, perhaps?], but I still remember the second banker fondly... Rustem was saving up money to pay for parachuting lessons." (p. 93). Melachi does not know why Rustem wanted such lessons, but one suspects, and cannot blame him.

I knew very little about Russian literature so I thought this could be an interesting book to read and I did find It interesting reading if not for the reasons I'd expected. Part autobiography and partly about Russian literature this book is full of surreal and inexplicable incidents which remain in the reader's mind after the book has been finished. There are useful lists at the end of the book of authors quoted in the text and of sources used which might send the reader off into new areas of exploration.I found the author's summer in Samarkand, which forms the middle section of the book, intriguing reading. I particularly loved the description of a game called Perfect Chess `. . . in which each player has, in addition to the standard pieces, two giraffes, two camels, two siege engines, and a vizier . . .' Then there was the author's recurring nightmare about being sent to stay with a family of penguins to learn their language. I also loved her description of the reconstruction of an 18th century ice palace in St Petersburg.Did I learn anything about Russian literature? Yes quite a bit. I'm now not sure whether I want to read any of it, except Chekov's short stories, because it all seems quite depressing. The book is intriguing reading because of its insight into other cultures which were certainly unfamiliar to me.

I loved Elif Batuman's book! It is a hybrid - part autobiographical novel, part research diary; it is packed with knowledge (gained or being acquired) and ideas, and it will make you laugh out loud. It tells about Russian classics, Uzbekistan and Uzbek culture and abut the vagaries of US graduate life, but, above all, the author's all-consuming love of things literary and her fresh take on lit-crit received wisdom will keep you under its spell from cover to cover.

A bit hard to get into

Great book. Really funny and learned and tolerant and slags the New Yorker. Something that needed doing. I shall read her other books