“If you’re going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Bable…” UPDATE
I know many of you are still working your way through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but when you finish you might enjoy The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. It will be especially interesting for perennial grad students trapped in dissertations on literary greats about whom nothing more can, or should be said. Elif Batuman is the author. One reviewer said she is like Janet Malcolm trapped in the body of Woody Allen, but really she’s more like Stephen Colbert trapped in the body of Gilda Radner.
Update: I have finished. Some of you may want to skip the last chapter. However, chapters on her summer in Samarkand (of Silk Road fame) are interesting and informative. In the course of The Possessed, she twice declares Oraham Pahmuk to be boring (he of many novels set in Istanbul). She too is a little boring (so restful for summer reading). Is this possibly a quality of Turkish and Turkish-American writing? As I comment on the thread, the book has many non-sequiters even while puzzling over the non-sequiterness of Russian literature. Something to think about!
Actually I think I might enjoy the latter book on Russian books and the people who read them. I am reminded of hearing one Orthodox theologian reminding his listeners that Dostoevsky was not a Russian Orthodox theologian. I would guess that statement would be disputed to say the least!
I just read in the Maritain biog. that for Dorothy Day there were three sources of her social thought — the Bible, Maritain, and The Brothers Karamazov.
I just finished reviewing two new Russian novels, “2017″ and “The Slynx.” Sort of dystopian magical realism that the book jackets say is “hilarious and ironic” (OK, I guess, in a “Brazil” kind of way), but mostly depressing, heavy, and kind of like walking through tar in snow shoes.
I had to go read some Jeeves and Wooster to detox, but Margaret’s rec sounds like it would have been better.
The author is an American-Turkish woman who speaks English and Turkish and in the course of what appears to be a memoir (but seems to have some novelistic elements) learns Russian and Uzbek and who knows what else by the end (where I have not yet gotten). Most of the time she is becoming a Russian lit scholar at Stanford U., which sound pretty realistic/surrealistic itself.
Be assured, it is not like walking through tar in snow shoes (my legs shudder to think of it) but it has a realistic/surrealistic cast to it… I confess I picked it up in the book store because it has a cover drawing by Roz Chast whose drawings and cartoons seem to capture the possible absurdity (but not to worry) of so much of what goes on around us. The Introduction got me and so here I am reading it… so far not depressing.
Did I mention that Turkish and Uzbek are closely related? That’s something I didn’t know.
Elif Batuman also has a blog I recommend, “My Life and Thoughts.” The most charming self-indulgence I’ve ever encountered on a blog.
Maybe so, Matt. But Is it self-indulgence or self-referential? Reading one or two of her blogettes and having finished the book, I propose that she has not yet reached the third person, singular or plural, and is stuck in the first person, singular. There are lapses to the second person, as in “You, faithful reader.” Maybe this is a generational thing. Or maybe it’s conceptual. She doesn’t think outside of the first person.
The book [the Possessed, that is] features a rich lode of non-sequiturs, about which I am trying to give some thought. By definition, of course, it is difficult to give continuous thought to the phenomenon. While struggling with this, I have wondered if her Turkish/Russian/Uzbek orientation makes the non-sequitur a perfectly acceptable rhetorical device in a way that is forbidden us in the Latin West, except for humorous purposes. Given her take on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, etc., (among other things, they have no obligation to rhetorical logic in the Western sense), I wouldn’t be surprised to find she is well-suited to her calling.
Peggy,
On her blog at least, Butuman is essentially a humorist and self-satirist, with a specialty in the indignities and absurdities of academic culture. I think the effect of cute inconsequence is entirely deliberate — and somehow effective. She can also play it straight, though, as she does in her New Yorker and London Review of Books articles and reviews. But even there she has a gimlet eye for the funny detail in things that are supposed to be serious and important.
Off subject: Do you think she ever finished her dissertation?