Review: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

title:  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books 

and the People Who Read Them [purchase here]

author:  Elif Batuman

genre: literary nonfiction essays

pages: 296

published: 2010

source:  New York Public Library

"In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one.  It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? 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 are really the same thing."  (page 10)

I added Batuman's The Possessed to my 30 Before 30 Literary Bucket List for several reasons: 

1) I follow her on Twitter and find her tweets hilarious and endearing (and her twitter handle is nothing short of amazing).

2) I LOVE narrative nonfiction.  I personally feel like I absorb more information when it's contextualized within the author's personal experience.

3) I've read her work for The New Yorker before (I especially liked her piece on the Davilov bells).

4)  I'm rereading Anna Karenina this summer, and figured a refresher course of sorts on Russian literature was probably in order.  I read Crime and Punishment in high school and a few Chekhov plays in college, so my Russian lit experience is fairly limited.  Any additional historical/biographical content/context can be nothing but helpful.

I was not disappointed.  Batuman is nothing short of delightful!  The Possessed was perfectly balanced between incredibly interesting information (from Babel to Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and back again) and Batuman's anecdotes, and was completely accessible.  The flow, the pace, the style...it just worked.

My favorite chapter:  "Who Killed Tolstoy?", in which Batuman shares her experience staying at Yasnaya Polyana (which is the estate where Tolstoy was born, spent most of his life, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina) for the International Tolstoy Conference and weaves in research to support her hypothesis that Tolstoy could have potentially been murdered.  Very funny.  Absolutely fascinating.

Fun fact:  

Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate : snakes :: Earnest Hemingway's Key West house : three toed cats.  

"'There are no cats at the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana,' begins Amy Mandelker's well-known study, Framing Anna Karenina:

'Curled, or rather, coiled in the sunny patches in the Tolstoy house, protecting it from pestilential infestations, instead of the expected feline emblems of domesticity...[are] snakes...The ancestors of these ophibian house pets were adopted by Tolstoy's ailurophobic wife, Sofia Andreyevna [Sonya], to rid the house of rodents.'

I was contemplating these lines on the second morning of talks, when I counted a total of four cats actually inside of the conference room.  That said, in fairness to Amy Mandelker, you couldn't accuse Yasnaya Polyana of a shortage of snakes.  At breakfast, one historian had described his experience researching the marginalia in Tolstoy's editions of Kant: he had seen a snake right there in the archive." (page 117)

Rubric rating: 8.5.  I really hope she's working on another book!!!  Or revives her blog.

Update:  I've now finished 6 of the 30 titles on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few more in progress.  I need to pick up the pace!!!

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck 

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

Review: The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

title:  The Russian Debutante's Handbook [purchase here]

author: Gary Shteyngart

pages: 476

genre: literary fiction

originally published: 2003

source:  New York Public Library

One of two things must be true:
a) either Gary Shteyngart was channeling one of my ex-boyfriends (a Bukharian Jew from Uzbekistan) when he created Vladimir Girshkin 
OR
b)  Shteyngart is a supremely talented architect of character.


And unless Shteyngart also has a time machine, I'm going to put my money on the latter rather than the former.


In Vladimir, Shteyngart balances almost paradoxical levels of swagger and self-deprecation; throughout the novel, Vladimir manages to sell himself short one moment, then brazenly shoot the moon the next, and I was with him every step of the way.  Even if I hadn't dated someone with the exact same extremes in their personality, Girshkin would never have read as inconsistent because Shteyngart's craft is that good and his characterizations, no matter how bizarre, are that honest (more on that in a bit).  It's a fascinating balance of traits to watch in a person, and likewise makes for a compelling character to follow, especially when combined with Vladimir's intellect and propensity towards personal analysis.


In Vladimir Girshkin's journey over the course of the novel, Shteyngart's takes a fairly familiar story line and turns it on its head:

• boy comes to America from a conflict-ridden country
• boy struggles to please both his new American peers and his old-country parents/relatives

Here's the part, where, if Shteyngart were another popular writer pontificating on the perils and complexities of The Immigrant Experience like, say, Amy Tan, the story would continue on as the boy, through the experience of his parents/relatives, is able to find his "unique" self, which usually means the boy becomes a bit more comfortable code-switching and balancing the old-country traditions and new American expectations. (ex: see anything written by Tan.  Really.  Anything.  She's RIDICULOUSLY consistent in her use of this structure, just swap "boy" for "girl" and "old country" for "China."  Formulaic, but it works for her.)  Instead of Vladimir learning how to be both a Russian Jew and an American (two states he sees as incredibly disparate), through the experience of others, Shteyngart allows Vladimir to venture to the city of Prava (Prague), "the Paris of the 90s", where he embarks on a journey of both deception and self-discovery as he learns to relegate his Russian Jewish childhood, his American adolescence, his Eastern European present and his uncertain future.  

The narrative is rife with the bizarre personalities whose influence shapes Vladimir along the way:  Challah, his ex-girlfriend, whom he not quite loves, who works in a sex dungeon; the Groudhog, the cut throat yet gregarious Russian mafioso determined to exploit the expat community of Prava who likes to be whipped while in the sauna; the Fan Man, father of the Groundhog, dead set on earning his American citizenship, and whose best friend is a small electric fan to whom he has given imaginary anthropomorphic qualities.  

My favorite scene in the novel, which I can share without spoiling the plot, takes place in Prava and highlights not only Shteyngart's unique narrative voice but the East/West motif that underscores the text.  Here, Vladimir  and the poet Fish are on the balcony of a nightclub and both have just snorted horse tranquilizer (It was the the 90s).  From the balcony, Vladimir is watching buses arrive and depart from Prava from the bus station below:

"But Vladimir's examination of this unhappy dichotomy, a dichotomy which was in some ways the story of his life, which brought on feelings of both elation and remorse--the elation of having a special, privileged knowledge of both East and West, the remorse of fitting finally into neither--was interrupted by the stinging, crystal-edged horse powder which the poet Fish administered to him nasally and then

not

much

happened.

Perhaps that's an exaggeration.  Something, of course, happened, even while Vladimir withdrew into the upper stories of his brain where the thin mountain air was not conducive to the cognitive process.  The buses kept arriving and departing but now they were just buses (buses, you know, transport, point A to point B) and Fish rolling up and down the balcony naked, howling, and waving his tiny purple penis at the moon was just a young man with his purple penis howling.  Nothing much was happening in a big way.  In fact, nonexistence was no longer so unfathomable (and how many times had he, as a morose child, shut his eyes and plugged his ears with cotton, trying to imagine The Void), but rather a fairly natural progression of this goofy happiness. The floating, bottomless joy of anesthesia.

And then the fifteen minutes were up and, like clockwork, Vladimir was noiselessly airlifted info his body; Fish was putting on his clothes."  (p. 306).

Rubric rating: 8.  Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story are on my holds list at the library and I'm absolutely looking forward to reading more of Shteyngart's unique voice.


All in all, Shteyngart's piece was almost good enough to make me nostalgic for my ex...almost.