Elif Batuman's "The Possessed": Book Review

 
These garrulous 2010 anecdotes of this Stanford graduate student document how Russian literature permeates the imagination of her peers and mentors. It also shows how unhinged, conniving, and silly academia can be. Nothing new there, but Elif Batuman is also an intellectual, as her Harvard undergraduate preparation shows. She also displays her determination to market herself then as now.

Cadging grants for specious research into Tolstoy's death sets in motion one chapter. Another, the most coherent and slightly less rambling, precedes that in demonstrating how to pitch Isaac Babel in more appealing form than a display of manuscripts in the Stanford library. Here, you get the best example of how Batuman examines herself in relation to her young life's pursuit. She thinks of literature as "a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft." The tell-tale "pretty much..." signals her habitual preference for the chatty over the sober in her scholarship. It's present, but until the last essay analyzing Devils (fka "The Possessed" itself, it prefers to soft-sell the lit-crit for a coming-of-age assemblage of journalism originally appearing in separate form. It shows. Some information repeats, and the Samarkand stint that's interspersed with the Russian-oriented entries makes the collection lurch about, even if she also links events and thoughts together in revised sections. It's ambitious, and it's certainly more readable, if loquacious.

She's attempting to align her dissertation about "big" novels and the way that they try to make the author's life resemble his or her beloved fiction, as with Don Quixote. "The novel form is 'about' the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books." Many who do create out of this tension attempt and perhaps fail to answer some of her big "different, insoluble" questions: "Why were people created? Why are all people unhappy? Why are intellectuals even unhappier than everyone else?" No answers emerge.

What energizes Batuman she finds repeated in a reconstructed palace of ice, "the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral." This is livelier than much of Harold Bloom, I do confess.

Some of the best parts show off Batuman's eye and ear. Natalie Babel turns "with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up." Another woman "spoke in a head voice, like a puppet." One more "chanted in a half-pleading, half-declaratory tine, like somebody proposing an hour-long toast." And, a "few times I saw a chicken walking about importantly, like some kind of regional manager."

As a critic, she attempts to push her education into the greater world, through an extended stay in Samarkand. Her own quest to see if her Turkish fluency and her Russian fascination overlap as she tries to learn Uzbek flounders, for "that didn't make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren't learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked." A different type of anxiety of influence lurks within this outcome.

When she applies Rene Girard's theory, we return to the diligent doctoral candidate. "According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves." As with ads that feature the beautiful or handsome possessor of the bottle of vodka, this supposed freedom that owner displays means that we are driven not "to possess the object, but to be the Other." This discourages her. Why not stop our pursuit? One novel would be all we needed to disabuse our self from illusion. Love and ambition, what Augustine posited as the "basic premises of literary narrative," would prove failures. Who needs any more scholars "in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?" Still, she ends the final entry by claiming if she did it all over, she'd "choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them."

Does this book of occurrences and contemplation succeed? It left me interested in Batuman's argument. It also left me somewhat bemused by her privilege (daughter of medical professionals, Jersey suburb, elite education, and a seeming knack at finagling her way into gaining funds), for she adapts the position of a six-foot-tall misfit. She cannot have been all that inept. I think she bobbles her attempt to parallel her unwieldy structure to Eugene Onegin's "strange appendix that doesn't make sense until later, out of order" but at least she tries to bridge the gap between the common reader seeking insight and entertainment, in what could have been a tired trope, the long march to the Ph.D.
(Amazon US 5/9/17)

Alex Beam's "The Feud": Audiobook Review

Fame came to Nabokov with Lolita as it ebbed from Wilson after his brief notoriety for the then-racy Memoirs of Hecate County. The two "frenemies" wound up as such, Alex Beam reasons, when the wealthy Russian exile found his comfortable critical and financial perch far above that of the also privileged Wilson. The neediness the emigre expressed to the the literary lion, Beam concludes, had made Vladimir uneasy decades later, and Wilson's attempts to speak truth to the power that became enshrined in VN led EW to try to hold his ground, and lash out, but VN gave better than he got back.

The titular feud began as VN's massive translation-commentary on the supposedly, to Nabokov, untranslatable Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin appeared. Reviewing in the then-nascent NYRB, Wilson, an earnest devotee of Russian but a progressive who sided with the Soviets, rankled the refugee who recalled the Bolsheviks machine-gunning the ship young VN fled on. Not to mention that the Soviets did in his father. So, Beam steadily narrates (via Robert Pullar's at-first hesitant, than warming up to wit in over five hours that felt due to their detail much longer) the trajectory that lifted up VN and drove down EW, after many years of erudite friendship and intellectual banter and support

That support wavered, Beam shows, well before the Onegin fracas that consumed many of the literati of the mid-1960s. EW had little patience for the likes of Lolita; VN. Beam avers, would have had as scant interest in Patriotic Gore, Wilson's in-depth study of the Civil War. Beam introduces each protagonist, documents their alliance, and then dissects their falling out. He keeps the pace lively in spite of dense material. He employs "kiss off" twice, "kooky," and "frenemy" alongside "booted" and "contumacious" and he enjoys the wit that his subjects naturally delighted in as they conducted what VN typically if obliquely given his prickly nature early on called a "friendly" exchange. And it's fun to imagine as some playful Nabokovians do if it was all a game, with VN writing letters to the NYRB and its ilk as EW and he as him, to mock such battles conducted in these journals. Even if it's fiction. 

(Amazon US 4/21/17) 

Simon Parke's "Conversations with Leo Tolstoy": Audiobook Review

I wanted to hear about Tolstoy, as well as listen to some of his classic works, long or short. Simon Parke's Conversations with Leo Tolstoy featured in online holdings as the only choice. Part of Parke's clever series using himself as a slightly hesitant interviewer hosting great thinkers, here Andy Harrison enlivens Tolstoy in his own words. However, this encounter is long after his mid-life conversion which lured him away from literary circles as he pursued his dogged spiritual quests.

It makes me wonder about Parke with Mozart, Van Gogh, Meister Eckhardt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jesus. It's a pleasingly disparate set of topics that Parke, assuming the hesitant delivery of a "Very British" pundit-journalist, delves into with Leo. Not only violence, war, and pacifism, but marriage, belief, science, and vegetarianism. For the audio, Andy Harrison fulminates appropriately, as his passionate advocacy of abstention from many delights as well as cruelties characterized his later life.

He despised King Lear, too. So, while I did not get much of the literary fame and fictional achievements, I did learn in these in-depth four hours quite a lot about Tolstoy's spirit. You understand better why his family relations were so tumultuous, and why he courted great fame. (Amazon US 4/20/17)

Paul Strathern's "Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes": Audiobook Review

Robert Whitfield in the audio's 128 minutes gallops through Paul Strathern's Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes. Whitfield channels Strathern's condensation of the author's essence. Strathern. He hears rants in the less "civilized" Dostoevsky, for whom those in their late teens comprise his fan-base.

I checked this out from my library's download as it was the only audio title I could find on this writer. It opens with the famous vignette of the man facing imminent execution as part of a set-up, before he served four years in Siberia for seditious activities. That is, joining a reading group on utopian socialism. Dostoevsky was sentenced to hard labor. But out of this struggle began the impetus for his greatest works. Strathern regards them as not quite the equal perhaps of Tolstoy, the inevitable rival.

Yet for their literary intensity, their depictions of distorted ideals and tragic souls, his fiction endures. It may not be as polished as other Russian authors, but it does speak to the unleashed forces within us. This audio goes rapidly, but you get the gist of his career with excerpts from his major novels. (Amazon US 4/20/17)

Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons": Audiobook Review

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I liked Anthony Heald's nuanced dramatization of the easily stereotyped Elmer Gantry a few years ago, when I was listening to Sinclair Lewis adaptations after making my way through his major novels. I assume Ivan Turgenev was in a way the Lewis of his day, half a century earlier, in sending up social mores and what a hundred years after Fathers and Sons was called "the generation gap."

This eight-hour reading of this 1862 work shows off Heald's ability to make characters brusque (Bazarov has a touch of blustering John Wayne to me), timid (most of the women regardless of class), bumptious (Arkady and his father Nikolai too), or flustered (Pavel among others). He also pays attention to the arguments advanced by the rude nihilist, and those of the Kirsanov brothers in reply: at one point the blunt doctor-to-be is chided as being among "four and a half" such angry young men.

In the narrative, both men face the opposition of the nobles and the upper class to their bold rejection of tradition and religion. Turgenev skims past these divisions, preferring to elaborate the psychological tensions as well as highlight the natural beauties apparent to one who in his earlier "hunting sketches" drew the plight of the suffering forward, as contrasted with the angst of graduates.

As my first exposure to Turgenev, this proved an engaging effort. I can see why Henry James praised his control of the narrative, and why Joseph Conrad would be attracted to its dissection of ideals. I'm not sure if it's risible that Bazarov for all his boasts of poverty--"my grandfather ploughed the land" visits his parents' home and mentions to Arkady that B's family only had fifteen (or was it twenty-two in another telling?) serfs. I suppose destitution was relative; I'd like to know Turgenev's take on it all.

As well as what "she's been through fire and water" and as a wag adds "all the brass instruments" means. While a bit may be lost in translation--Heald used the uncredited public domain Constance Garnett rendering while I followed along in the copyright-free 1948 Richard Hare version---this remains a valuable look at the up-and-coming tensions that would in half-a-century tear Russia apart. (Amazon US 4/14/17: Favorite quote from a nihilist: "Death's an old story, but new for each person.")

Liza Knapp's "The Giants of Russian Literature": Audiobook Review

 

I checked this out [in The Modern Scholar series at over seven hours total] via my library to hear, as an introduction to the big four, Turgenev and Chekhov as well as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I've read some of the latter two, along with a few stories by Chekhov. Liza Knapp, from Columbia U., addresses us as she might her beginning students. She takes the theme, crediting both Woody Allen and E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," to emphasize the existential themes of love and death in the four. Her delivery is acceptable, but she hesitates a lot in her speech patterns, halting sometimes at odd moments in her sentences.

She aroused my curiosity about the comparatively lesser appreciated (at least in renown abroad today) "Fathers and Sons" as an exemplar of a well-crafted fictional creation of the same century that found the novel so perfected in Britain. Frankly, while Turgenev does not sound that exciting, I was interested to learn that he influenced the Irish writer William Trevor, who made his "Reading Turgenev" novella in "Two Lives" on this inspiration. I'd have liked more from Knapp on the wider impact of Turgenev, as he is now eclipsed by the three admirers who followed him.

Dostoevsky's dramatic life follows, and Knapp refers us to his biographer Joseph Frank for more detail. She takes "Notes from the Underground" with its carping narrator as a harbinger of what so many after him next century would harp upon. (A star deducted as the "Notes" lecture is not a half-hour as the rest of the main ones, but it cuts off mid-sentence at under thirteen minutes.) She reminds us how these later 19th c. works only found translation via Constance Garnett (and the Maudes) at the start of the 20th c. among English-language audiences then creating quite an effect. "Crime and Punishment" gains center stage here as the set-text. Similarly, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" dominates that next section.

Finally, Chekhov in a few stories shows his own background; as with the previous three, Knapp guides us as to how each came from a class system that left a firm mark on their outlooks and attitudes. I found it surprising that Chekhov professed (like a man between wife and mistress) going back and forth between his medical profession and his writing avocation when he got bored with the charms of one and then the other.

In conclusion, Knapp suggests that the answer tor the meaning of life may lie in the love that carries us on in the face of inevitable death. She credits the four Russian giants as pioneering the Big Questions in fictional form which have preoccupied so many of us, writers or readers, since. (Amazon US 3-27-17)