Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

I frequently leave a little note at the beginning of a book I’m reading with my name and the month/year in which I’ve begun the book. Typically when I pick up a book to read again, I have at least some recollection of having read it before if I find such a note, but in this case had not the slightest memory that I had apparently read some of this in fall 2014.

This is even odder because I loved the book this time I read it. Many passages made me actually laugh out loud, not just chuckle under my breath.

This is not a book review, mostly just a selection of some of my favourite passages.

  • The story of folk hero Nasreddin Hoca, who was walking along a dark road a night and heard some horsemen approaching. Fearing they would rob or conscript him he jumps over a wall into a graveyard. The riders were just travelers, but curious about this behavior come to look at him lying in the wet dirt and ask what he is doing, he replies “it’s more complicated than you think. You see I’m here because of you, and you’re here because of me” (83).
  • “The apple was hard, green, and misshapen, like the answer to some pointless riddle” (87)
  • Page 90, jokes about omnipresence of Pushkin, how he is a metaphor for anyone’s uncle, “And who will foot the bill, Pushkin?” I laughed out loud at the excerpt from the play where Gogol wakes up, trips over Pushkin, and exclaims “Pushkin again!”
  • Pedagogy advisor who suggests the teachers-in-training treat their stupider students with sympathy, as if they had cancer (99)
  • Never regret a generous error (101)
  • Hotel concierge who could not locate their hotel on a map, his finger just hovering over it, “this is very embarrassing for me”, his sincerity left an impression (103).
  • Kazakhs don’t like trees, no way (106).
  • Guy whose build recalls an anthropomorphic piece of furniture from a Disney movie (107)
  • Elif’s Uzbek tutor walks her home then hides behind a tree, she claims to have not seen anyone when her host mother asks (109).
  • The boys’ accordion group who play with the mannerisms of old, nostalgic men, even winking at the audience (127).
  • “It” means dog in Uzbek and Turkish but has very negative connections in Uzbek. You can’t really find any info about this on the web, pages of barely informative results stuffed with ads.
  • The poor Uzbek philosophy student who can’t get any philosophy books from the unreliable librarian and then gets a bunch but all in Arabic which he can’t read, and his grandfather will only read after the student has weeded his cabbage garden (150).
  • Another of Elif’s Uzbek tutors hates Genghis Khan, says the Uzbek scholars had porcelain tea cups which rang different musical notes when you tapped them, GK destroyed them all, the secret of their construction was lost (157).
  • Old Uzbek considered superior to Persian, 70 words for “duck” Persian just had one (158).
  • Old Uzbek had 100 words for crying, maybe more; this comes up at various trying times in the book.
  • Who is the genius, the blind poet or the one who saw his mashed up bean and declared it a ram? (159-60)
  • The terrifying image of a parrot feeding a pistachio to the beloved’s lips (161).
  • The two great literary themes of social inequality and crop irrigation (175).
  • A Navoi poem that seems like it could have inspired Romeo and Juliet though Shakespeare scholars deny this.
  • The full weight of historical boredom upon one’s soul (199).
  • Tolstoy epigram/aphorism on how what you imagine a poem in a foreign language says can be more beautiful and poetic than what is actually says, and then when you properly read and understand it you may miss your imagined version—or not (248).
  • “Like much of Dostoyevsky’s work, Demons consists primarily of scandalous revelations, punctuated by outbreaks of mass violence” (257).
  • The final chapter, begins with Dante, then spends most of it discussing love and obsession, but doesn’t much mention Dante again, certainly not Beatrice, why? It ends with Elif saying she’d study literature all over again, because “If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I think that’s where we’re going to find them” (290).

I felt a sort of melancholy when I finished the book. It reminded me of something a friend told me long ago about how she was sad for weeks after finishing Bolaño’s 2666. The Possessed did not have quite such a strong impression on me, but the way Batuman is able to move effortlessly back and forth between intimate pictures of the people in her life and “big ideas” is spectacular, and almost every character she paints, even briefly, leaves you wanting to know more about that person, endears them to you.

Also it made me want to re-read Dostoevsky, of which I have read little. I read The Idiot in early high school when I was way too young to get anything from it. I realize I may have entirely missed the irony and perhaps even Gogol-esque humour in Dostoevsky’s work (or maybe I am misreading some passages from Batuman that suggest such a connection).

There is also an interesting discussion on Girard’s theory of memetic desire, which I am only passingly familiar with, but have a similar impression that it is (my words, not exactly Batuman’s) just another example of a philosopher trying to reduce multi-faceted/complicated phenomena of human life to a single factor, and is therefore ultimately trivial but fascinating in a way that is appealing to young people in liberal arts programs.