num_pages: 296
description: No one who read Elif Batumans first article (in the journal n1) will ever forget it. Babel in California told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages Batuman managed to misplace Babels last living relatives at the San Francisco airport uncover Babels secret influence on the making of King Kong and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable comic humane ironic charming poignant and completely unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batumans subsequent piecesfor The New Yorker Harpers Magazine and the London Review of Books have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoys ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford Switzerland and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkins wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel the individual in history the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Pushkin to Platonov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influenceincluding her own.
language: English
title: The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux