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Indlæser... The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (original 2010; udgave 2010)af Elif Batuman
Work InformationThe Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them af Elif Batuman (2010)
Indlæser...
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Very, very funny. ( ) At times a little too self consciously observer of the details. Objective interested inquiry into the quirks of any insular world, still, the academic world of Slavic literature is rife for such observations. There is a somber and beleaguered tone, but in the end comes back to a love of literature, a love of Russian literature. She obviously gets the humor of Russian literature (at least as I do) but lacks the vitality in her own writing which I attest to a sort of david Foster Wallace post modernism. I have particular interest in her topics, but not a book for everyone. A bit too recursively intellectual, is my Bourdieu-esque take on the thing. Ha. Ha. Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk, "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul? This is a collection of personal essays centering on Batuman's time working towards her Ph.D in Russian literature. She goes to a Tolstoy conference in Russia, helps host a Babel conference at Stanford University and studies Uzbek in Samarkand for a summer and tours the more obscure corners of Turkey for Let's Go. Batuman is a likable main character in her accounts. She appears to be a hapless victim of circumstance, having accidentally fallen into Russian literature, but she's also someone who is relentlessly curious about the world around her and willing to jump into circumstances most people would balk at. She cheerfully endures weird and trying experiences and turns them into funny stories. My favorite essays are the ones set during her summer in Samarkand, a city which sounds endlessly exotic, but is also in a former Soviet satellite state still struggling to regain its feet. Most of the stories are set among graduate students and visiting scholars and if that sounds even halfway interesting to you, this is a book you'll like; it's witty and intelligent and has a great sense of the absurd. And if you've read either of her novels, you'll get to read about the experiences that she later fictionalized.
The dull pewter of Uzbekistan’s literary offerings makes Russia’s great names seem all the more lustrous, but this book is only secondarily about literature: its main attraction is Elif Batuman herself. Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite and memorable, “The Possessed” is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy... Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place: “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love” bound up, indeed, with Russian. As a soulful Russian-language teacher might say as she hands out a piece of chocolate to her pet student: Molodets. Way to go. Elif Batuman is clearly one of those people whom Babel described, in one of his Odessa stories, as having “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” Her autumnal impulses are balanced by jumpy, satirical ones. It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder. Batuman does what all great essayists do—she fills her readers with a passion for the subject at hand while simultaneously exploring its complexity. HæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
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 influence--including her own. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.709Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian literature History and criticism of Russian literatureLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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