The Possessed

April 24, 2017
In her debut memoir, originally published in 2010 and now available in the audio format, Batuman revisits her seven years as a grad student in Stanford’s comp lit program, where she focused on Russian novelists. Chapters on Babel, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other great Russian writers alternate with chapters describing a summer the author spent studying Uzbek in Samarkand. Batuman’s narration, like her prose, is charming and self-deprecating, and she deftly navigates the book’s many Russian names and words. She’s an inexperienced audio narrator, but her naïve approach is perfect for the material. In between meditations on life, art, and graduate school, she relates amusing anecdotes about her subjects: listeners may be surprised to learn that Tolstoy was a skilled tennis player or that, during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, Babel may have saved the life of downed American pilot Merian Caldwell Cooper, who went on to direct King Kong in 1933. Batuman’s wit and eye for absurdist detail come alive in this long-awaited audio edition. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback.

Starred review from November 2, 2009
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 Asia's enigmatic present. (Her baffled précis 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: she's the rare writer who can make the concept of “mimetic desire” vivid and personal. If you've ever felt like you're living in a Russian novel—and who hasn't?—Batuman will show you why.