Besatta

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books And The People Who Read Them is Elif Batuman's memoir of life as a Turkish-American postgraduate at Stanford, trying to figure out Russian literature, the Russian language, Russian (and Soviet) society, and of course other people who do the same. It's packed to the rafters with analyses of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tjechov and mediaeval Uzbek poetry.

And it's absolutely hilarious.

Sure, part of that is Batuman's writing, dry and incredibly quotable, often dipping into fond satire of literary criticism. But just as often it's the sheer absurdity of the situations she finds herself in. A dinner party for the daughters of the long-dead Isaak Babel, who are greeted as celebrities but turn out to have nothing new to offer about a writer nobody seems to know anything about. A summer-long excursion to Samarkand which ends up in complete chaos. An newly discovered plot to murder Tolstoy, the investigation of which gets thwarted by an excursion to Tjechov's home - not because it has anything to do with Tolstoy, it's just conveniently close. An attempt to understand why the hell Empress Anna built a palace of ice in St Petersburg and forced her jesters to have marital relations in it. How Dostoevsky's Demons is a lot like the complex interpersonal relationships at a university. And obviously, the similarity between King Kong and diaries from the Soviet-Polish war, but that goes without saying.

And the thing is, it works. Batuman is funny, but she also knows what she's talking about, and she comes up with a lot of fascinating insights. But above all, she captures the sheer joy of immersing yourself in reading, in needing to find out what makes it tick, chasing after the tangible bits - the houses, the writing desks, the writers - as a substitute for getting to the actual story. I love this. I just wish there was more of it.