the possessed

I just read The Possessed, Elif Batuman's first book, about her various encounters with Russian literature during the time in university and at her PhD when she was studying it. As with all of her work, it is funny, engaging, highly fascinating, and very thought-provoking. Some notes:

Within the first few pages Batuman recounts her freshman year experience taking beginner's Russian and falling in love with a guy in her class, then going to Budapest to teach English in the summer - the plot of The Idiot. I'd always known that The Idiot was based on her life (not because I did that much research or anything but because it obviously was, just from the setting and stuff like that), but I never realised that it was exactly her life. I'd assumed that at least some of it was completely made up for narrative interest, like the story about the physicist that she reads for her class, which felt so weird and surreal that it must've been made up. But even that actually happened. I don't know... for some strange, inexplicable reason, I feel a bit betrayed and sad that basically everything is true but with the names changed a little. Maybe it's because, although I love The Idiot in part because it makes being a lonely student with not much to do seem as cool as anything else, it still has all this interesting stuff that happens that doesn't feel real. I really don't know. But somehow this has slightly dampened my enjoyment of the novel.

Like in The Idiot, Batuman's voice is so unique here. The way that she observes everything happening around her and makes all these observations of the small details makes the incredibly normal things appear magical or absurd. But after a while it kind of gets on your nerves... she starts to come off as arrogant, because there is little about her as a person -- it's all just her perspective and the way she sees others. So when everyone she meets is a little weird, it makes it seem like she thinks she's superior to them all- she's the only normal, sane person in this crazy world of landladies who force their guests to eat ant-infested jam when they do in fact have good jam and of respected professors who poop their pants in public. Even the Old Uzbek stories, filtered through her teacher, become slightly comical. Just by virtue of pointing anything out at all, Batuman manages to make what she has pointed out feel weird. It reminds me of when my friend from Oxford, Jason, came to stay in Geneva for a weekend while he was traveling and he would point something out about my house, like the London 2012 Olympics keyring we'd bought but never gifted that had stayed, still inside the original packaging, on top of a wardrobe in the hallway until now. And suddenly I would feel super self-conscious and awkward about the presence of that keyring, even though he'd meant nothing by pointing it out. Even though it had been a neutral observation. I guess it goes back to Sartre, and the vulnerability of being seen - the fact that the second that something is seen/recognised/acknowledged there's immediately this idea of shame associated with it, of like, "Oh no, I've been discovered." I even told Jason that he reminded me of Elif Batuman. It's not that Batuman is being malicious when she characterises the people she encounters in that way, but the fact that she wittingly describes them as these sort of eccentric, nonsensical people just feels, after a while, kind of mean-spirited. It feels like everyone she meets is just a caricature, that nobody can really please her or come off as just... normal. It feels like everyone is being mocked - like that high school girl who exchanges open-mouthed, wide-eyed, laughing scoffs with her friends when you walk past (even if it might not be about you), making you feel like the most worthless, insignificant insect in the whole world. And while the reader is meant to partake in this inside joke of 'look how weird these people are', you start to feel a bit uncomfortable at the way Elif/Selin navigates life, as some kind of cynical/ironic bystander who describes other peoples' eccentricities for our private amusement. You don't really want to be that person.

Anyways. I still love Batuman and want her to adopt me. I'll close off with this quote that she says about Isaac Babel but which is also a big theme from The Idiot and which I think about a lot. I'm not sure if I relate to it or not.

"Babel wasn't alienated from life––to the contrary, he sought it out––but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature."

edit: Just to add.... Elif Batuman has honestly had my dream life. Harvard undergrad (completed in three years) and then 7 years doing a PhD at Stanford, all the while writing for magazines and travelling a lot... and now the author of two books. Also she's funny and so beautiful. OMG Elif please be my mentor I wanna be like you <3