Smart and very, very funny, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.00 paperback original) is well worth a read. Batuman has an ear for dialogue—and the luck to have found herself, repeatedly, in unexpectedly zany situations. While academia doesn’t lack for characters, Batuman seems to have stumbled upon some of the most excessively strange of these.The best chapters in the book are the introduction and Batuman’s essays “Babel in California” and “Who Killed Tolstoy?” The introduction sees Batuman teaching English and judging leg contests (read it) in Hungary after her freshman year in college. In the first essay, the Stanford Slavic department finds itself suddenly bound up in the tensions and eccentricities of Isaak Babel’s surviving family; in the latter, Batuman attends a conference at Leo Tolstoy’s estate, weaving through the whole chapter her cast-aside theory that Tolstoy was poisoned and her attempt to regain her lost luggage:
“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?”
Batuman’s humor, often good-natured, can also be biting at times—it’s then that she seems to prey on the weak—and the final chapter is an unworthy, unfocused conclusion to an otherwise fine book. But these are both small quibbles. The Possessed will make you laugh and read aloud, and when Batuman talks about the literature itself, she does so beautifully.
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