Batuman, Elif. The Possessed. Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010. Memoir, 1/24.

I really like this author. She is a trueblue lit academic: Harvard undergrad before it “woke up” and then a Stanford comparative lit PhD, also New Yorker staff writer, She writes fiction too, her novel The Idiot borrows its title from Dostoyevsky who said his Idiot was his favourite. There’s a compelling ambiguity in Batuman’s story that matches his. Wikipedia tells us Batuman “identifies as queer”, having dated men until middle age before making the switch. She seems happy to let the world know about that. In this discursive memoir she is so sarcastically funny that a lot of serious or serious-looking content could be winking at us or inviting us into ambiguity.

Her parents were Turkish, but she was raised in New York and New Jersey. Uzbekistan where she goes to study the language and where a lot of the memoir is set is both deadpan hilarious to her American sensibility and can be read as doubly ironic in the mind of someone only half a generation away from the Muslim near East.

As a graduate student at Stanford Batuman has a platonic but dreamily admiring relationship with a brilliant male classmate. She reports her group is intellectual-academically analysing (but really half-living) the nihilistic theories of one René Girard, a professor.

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…(the) point isn’t to possess the object (of desire), but to be the Other. (That’s why so many advertisements place less emphasis on the product’s virtues than on its use by some beautiful and autonomous-looking person: the consumer craves not the particular brand of vodka, but the being of the person who chose it.)… Because the mimetic desire of the novelistic hero is never directed at its true object, which is in any case unattainable, it is fundamentally masochistic, violent, and self-destructive…

If Girard was right about the human condition, the only appropriate course of action was to stop what we were doing, all of us, right now.

Possibly to escape taking this kind of thing to heart she travels with her boyfriend or a summer in Samarkand in Uzbrkistan to learn the language and culture of that country:

At the time, the department awarded two kinds of international travel grants: $1,000 for presenting a conference paper or $2,500 for field research. My needs clearly fell into the first category, but with an extra $1,500 on the line, I decided to have a go at writing a field-research proposal.

Reflecting on Samarkand and also Russia her surprise is intercropped with some dazzling insights which are called into question by their companions. Here are a few quotes, irony alternating with insight:

(Young Uzbek misunderstands narrator’s relationship with her boyfriend) Are you sure you’re twenty-four? . . . I have to have some words with your husband. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything bad. I’ll just explain to him, as one married man to another, what he has to do.” Suddenly bethinking himself, Habib lowered his voice. “Does he know what he has to do? And when he has to do it?”

I began to understand why it had been so difficult to write about my summer in Samarkand which, despite all the appurtenances of a new beginning, an exotic adventure, had actually been the end of something. It had been the kind of strange appendix that doesn’t make sense until later, out of order—as the surviving fragments of the “Journey” appear in Eugene Onegin only as a footnote following the final chapter.

(Uzbek hostess describing local healthcare) In the Koran it is written: if you clean yourself with clay after going to the bathroom, and then wash it off, you’ll never get hemorrhoids. Ninety-seven percent of the soil’s elements are found in the human body, and these minerals are transmitted via the soil to various fruits and vegetables.

Somewhere even further away, the beast waits in its thicket, watching the snow pile soundlessly on the hillside. Now the black monk is calling me—he says it’s time to go, time to start collecting the ashes. This is the kind of work that will kill you. But I’ll have you know, DJ Spinoza, that I haven’t given up. If I could start over today, I would 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.

Batuman is intellectually and viscerally into the literature and culture of Russia and its former colonies. Even Americans take great Russian literature seriously but classic Russia’s famous victories of the imagination grew out of a monstrously complicated culture, alien to us in the “west”. Her description of exhibits in a Russian museum is a holistic mix of horror and irony:

…skeletons weeping into handkerchiefs made of brain tissue, with worms made of intestines encircling their legs. Geological backdrops were made of gall- and kidney stones; trees and bushes, of wax-injected blood vessels. In one diorama, a child’s skeleton, using a bow made of a dried artery to play on a violin made from an osteomyelitic sequestrum, was surmounted by the Latin legend: “Ah fate, ah bitter fate!”

I’m sorry I don’t think this review has captured my appreciation of this uniquely-styled memoir. If you decide to give it a try I hope you enjoy Batuman’s combination of deadpan wonder at the absurdity of a completely different society alongside her struggles to incorporate her theoretical studies and experience of Russian literature into her life.

She is a serious academic but also a terrific writer.

8.8/9.4