Elif Batuman's World of Literature

I've dipped into some of this year's lauded new novels, yet find they don't engage me. I'm sure it's reader error. I have a new hot writer on the radar: Sam Lipsyte, authr of "The Ask." He's apparently the latest Gordon Lish protege and uses scatological, risque language to depict disturbing, sexually explicit scenes. Whooooo, baby, I'm starting to tingle.

Meanwhile, I'm entertained by Elif Batuman's "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." Batuman, who received her doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford and now teaches at "the Farm," pulls back the curtain on the world of academia. Her views of professors, scholars and graduate students swing from the richly comic to the devastatingly cruel and often sad.

Batuman gives a vivid account of how she rejected the world of "creative writing" and literary workshops to become an academic. She defends the long reviled and ridiculed practice of literary theory. While she decided against the fiction writing life, her pieces read like a strong contemporary novel, with strong passages of often absurdist dialogue that made me wonder if some of it were invented or embellished. She claims that all is real.

Here's a strong passage in which she disputes the common wisdom that "theory" ruins literature. "Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?"

Although I don't remember ever reading her in New Yorker, Batuman is the latest product of that vaunted magazine. She's also a member of the "N + 1" community, those young, or perhaps not so young now, well-read folk who've sought to keep literary culture going in the age of text messages, Twitter and the IPod. Batuman is a strong advocate for literary culture, as well as the need to uphold the teaching of literature in our curious age that swings from utilitarianism to superstition.

Another plus of the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in original paperback, is the bright-yellow and orange cover design by the outstanding and truly original New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. Chast's inimitable drawings aptly illustrate the book's comic, questing spririt.

Batuman's work will also give you knowledge about those masterpieces of Russian literature you probably haven't read or haven't read in quite a while. Quite handy for dinner parties to be able to come up with some anecdotes about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy  or Isaac Babel. Actually, I have a copy of Babel's "Red Cavalry Stories" which I was unable to finish a few years ago. Batuman inspired me to try again: one of the missions of her book is demonstrate how books can enhance life and repay constant, "posssessed" study.

Comments

[Tim Suermondt]

Over the recent years, Isaac Babel has become the darling Russian writer. Pasternak has faded a bit. And what's going on with Tsvetaeva?
Ah, the ups and downs of the Literary Writers stock market.

[Kelly Cherry]

Tim, Tsvetaeva is still riding strong. There's a new "biography" of her comprising pieces her daughter wrote about her, and it's wonderful. I think (without knowing Russian, so take this with a grain of salt) that Pasternak was always a better poet than fiction writer and I love some of his poems.

[Louis Mayeux]

Kelly and Tim: Thanks for the comments. I also love Pasternak's poems, including those he wrote as "Dr. Zhivago." Louis

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