Book : The Possessed Adventures With Russian Books And The..

-Titulo Original : The Possessed Adventures With Russian Books And The People Who Read Them

-Fabricante :

Farrar, Straus And Giroux

-Descripcion Original:

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Life imitates art-and even literary theory-in this scintillating collection of essays. Stanford lit prof Batuman (recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award) gleans clues to the conundrums of human existence by recalling scenes from her grad-student days in academe and exotic settings like Samarkand. A Tolstoy conference sparks her investigation into the possible murder, both physical and metaphysical, of the great man. She spends a summer in Samarkand reading impenetrable works in Old Uzbek as a window into Central Asias enigmatic present. (Her baffled precis of one legend reads in part, Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between chicken and sheep.) The book climaxes in a Dostoyevskian psychodrama that swirls around a magnetic grad student in the comp-lit department. Batuman is a superb storyteller with an eye for absurdist detail. Her pieces unfold like beguiling shaggy dog tales that blithely track her own misadventures into colorful exegeses of the fiction and biographies of the masters: shes the rare writer who can make the concept of mimetic desire vivid and personal. If youve ever felt like youre living in a Russian novel-and who hasnt?-Batuman will show you why. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. One of The Economists 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 Batumans first article (in the journal n1) 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 Babels last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babels 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. Batumans subsequent pieces for The New Yorker, Harpers 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 Tolstoys ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkins 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. From Bookmarks Magazine Possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years (Dallas Morning News), Batumans intriguing blend of travelogue, autobiography, and literary criticism offers a fresh perspective on some of Russias greatest authors. Despite its challenging subject matter, The Possessed is accessible and entertaining, written with sly humor and a keen eye for absurdity. Some critics considered its essays uneven, but they still praised Batumans infectious delight in literature and her examination of the many ways we can live lives more attuned to our favorite books. Perhaps the New York Times said it best: Shes the kind of reader who sends you back