The Possessed: A Journey Through Russian Literature and Its Readers - Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

$12.32

$16.43

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The Possessed: A Journey Through Russian Literature and Its Readers - Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

The Possessed: A Journey Through Russian Literature and Its Readers - Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

$12.32

$16.43

25% Off

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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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Reviews

*****

Verified Buyer

To be honest, I got this book on a whim. Having just gotten a Kindle as a present, and heading off to the former soviet union yet again after being there for 2 years ( I was only back in the US for about 6 weeks) I decided that instead of all the historical Non-fiction i read about this part of the world, why not read a book about the books I felt I could never read. After all, these books scared me. Have you seen their size? They make good anti-mugging tools, and the stories are grand on a scale the size of the country. How is one supposed to follow all the plots, and the dreams, and the dreams within the plots within the dreams within the balls?? Even though I have studied, lived and worked in this part of the world, I couldn't get into the literature.That is, until I read this book. This book starts by explaining a love story of sorts that isnt even a "real Russian story", but to me thats what this book is, a great love story. Her adventures lead her all over the Russian landscape, both in books and in real life. They cause her to ask questions which are intrinsic to being Slavic it seems, "When you love someone, what is it that you actually love?" and "who actually killed a man many are 100% sure died because of a stroke". And listening to her talk with so much care in her heart for these books, which have scared me ever since I tried to read War and Peace in its original Russian and French double type, I began to see that my fear was wrongly placed. It was really in the rash move of a student who knew only little Russian to try and take on the Russian Epic.Since picking up this book I have bought, or found, 25 russian books for my kindle or in properback (in english except for one) which I will be reading as I sit in the Post-Soviet world again, in my own version of a Summer in Samarkand.To those who say its too expensive for a kindle I beg to differ. Her ability to get me interested in writers (who you can get almost all, if not all, of their books for Free from the kindle), to get me into the lives and discussions about the books, to basically show me the literary criticism field, all without me realizing what I was doing, is more than worth it. I hope she gets most of it, but even if she doesn't, I will be buying this book again.

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