A Wonderful Place to Be

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman: The Idiot (a novel)

I assigned my students the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Demons (aka The Possessed, aka The Devils). I assumed, incorrectly, as usual, that the fact that this novel had "changed my life" (as I told my wary class), that it would do the same for them. What I should have done was assigned Elif Batuman's witty essays on Russian literature instead; not only would the kids be having a lot more fun, they'd be learning that it's possible to love life-changing books and still be hip, funny, engaging, and cool.

If I had a cell phone I'd follow Ms. Batuman's tweets. @BananaKarenina is her code name.  One made me laugh out loud: twice-divorced birds.

I half-imagined The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them would provide me with some tips on turning young (non)-readers onto Dostoevsky's baffling and wonderful tale of political intrigue in Russia in the 1860's, just after the emancipation of the serfs. There's so much to enjoy in Dostoevsky's maze of a book--so much that illuminates Russian history and its contending Westernizers and Slavophils, its tendency to embrace both individualism and autocracy (see Masha Gessen's brilliant The Future is History). Her chapter on The Possessed captures all of the confusions and oddities of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, but, best of all, are the chapters on Batuman's sojourn in Samarkand studying Uzbek, a Turkic language (Batuman speaks Turkish), and having the kind of zany adventures in misunderstanding that Selin, the hero of The Idiot, has while teaching English in a Hungarian village.

A typical Batuman-Selin interaction with another human being involves misunderstanding, a deftly deployed mix of earnestness and klutziness, and self-abasement that would be pathological were it not so endearing, all rendered in a crisp, epigrammatic style that you will want to copy snippets of in your notebook. Batuman-Selin writes a lot down; she plans to be a novelist, but, more than that, her tendency toward second guessing each event in her life makes record-keeping a must. At some point one has to sort things out. I loved her voice, whoever she was imitating. So smart to see that the study of language has both everything and nothing to do with the living of one's life, with the understanding of other people. Selin, the "idiot" of the title of Batuman's novel, is Myshkin, that is, a truly good person baffled by her own impulses and, while eager to understand other people, especially the Chekhovian Ivan, too innocent to do so.

Ms. Batuman is wicked smart (as we say in New Jersey).  If you haven't read much Isaac Babel you should by all means read her fresh take on this great and doomed Ukrainian writer, murdered on Stalin's orders in 1940. Batuman is especially good on Babel's relationship with Maxim Gorky, Babel's sometime patron and protector.  (Batuman, who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford, isn't making anything up).

Babel's NKVD photo from the time of his arrest

The two weeks I spent reading Batuman's books were refreshing. Her quirky brain was a wonderful place to be. She does a lot of things well, e.g. write a really engaging and original novel about being in college--at Harvard of all places. When was the last time you read a decent novel about a college student? A novel in which there is no sex, drugs, or even, aside from a couple of beers, any drinking. Or a collection of essays on Russian literature that is as engaging as Joseph Frank's great biography of Dostoevsky?

I've been reading Ms. Batuman's New Yorker pieces when I can find them. She's got a gig there doing cultural criticism, whatever that means. A piece she wrote on Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is particularly good. When I finished it I had two thoughts: first, what a pain in the neck to not only have to read such an awful book but then to have to sit through the movie made of it, and then to have to write something intelligent about it--Batuman chose marriage as abduction. But then it occurred to me that the NYer will be paying Elif well enough so that she can finish up her new novel. I can't wait.

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Absurdly, I've pledged--that is, I have written in my notebook--to read one hundred books this year. Fifty of them will be collections of poetry, so the total page count won't be impossible. All I wanted to say about this New Year's resolution was that one poet I wanted to "do," as in read all of, was Mary Oliver. I read three of her books this week--they're slim and easygoing--and my fondness for the simplicity and honesty of her poems, their quiet wisdom, was confirmed. Then I read an essay about Ms. Oliver in a back issue of the New Yorker (I knew nothing of her life), and I was surprised to learn that her work is disparaged by "serious readers of poetry," and by "critics." It appears her subject matters--nature, the inward life, even, god help us,  God--are out of style. I wondered if this condemnation would include other of my go-to poets--Maxim Kumin, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz (also a long-time resident of Cape Cod), Wesley McNair and others who don't blanch at searching out deeper meanings. Strange this whole business of poetry criticism. With novels one might see the utility of reviews and critiques as a means of directing readers to books they might prefer, but with poetry, which already has so few readers, why disparage a poet who has won the Pulitzer Prize, who has pursued the craft for half a century, who has lived as a poet lives and not as an academic? Anyway, I'm baffled. How does one dislike Mary Oliver? And here's something else I love about Elif Batuman: she laughs without mocking.

George Ovitt (1/28/2018)