We are currently highlighting our display - Around
the World with Books - featuring novels for
travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to Russian classic
fiction.
Though implausible, the most chortlingly funny book I’ve read in
years is about graduate school. Elif Batuman - a blogger,
New Yorker writer, and madcap
academic - is a disarming story-teller; her relentless enthusiasm for books
is contagious. In the seven essays of THE
POSSESSED: Adventures with Russian Books and the People
Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
$15), Batuman recaps her immoderate enamorment with Russian literature and how
this love leads her to Stanford’s Comp Lit department and a cohort which she
likens to the spiraling madness of Dostoevsky’s Demons (a.k.a. The
Possessed). Her love also takes her farther afield, to a mystifying summer
in Samarkand studying Old Uzbek epics; to an International Tolstoy Scholars
Conference and suspicions of foul play; and to the Neva River to investigate
the curiously sinister backstory of an ice palace for The New Yorker.
Familiarity with Babel and Bakunin aren’t prerequisites; Batuman’s book is a
clever treatise on the reasons we read. - Lila Stiff
In
July, Elif Batuman appeared (along with
John Waters) on Michael
Silverblatt's program "Bookworm" on KCRW, to
offer her top ten list of Russians to read.