The Russian connection

It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch.

It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch. I began it on the train; barely had I started before my involuntary yelps of hilarity were causing alarm amongst my fellow passengers. An elderly man moved to another seat after I came upon Batuman’s description of the time she found herself judging an adolescent boys’ leg contest in Hungary. Fortunately, perhaps, I arrived at my station before Batuman embarked on an account of an excruciatingly funny literary seminar to rival Lucky Jim.

Loosely based around the seven years she spent writing a thesis at Stanford University, Batuman’s chatty, meandering memoir contains pieces on her favourite Russian authors rather in the Janet Malcolm mould, while covering various trips to the former Soviet Union, the idiosyncrasies of academic life, college amours, grant applications, etc. The whole is embellished with numberless further digressions, and detours, and detours around digressions, all of it comic, poignant, and very entertaining, as long as you relinquish any idea of getting somewhere.

Rather late on I discovered that The Possessed is partly made up of previously published magazine pieces, which is one explanation for its looping progress. On the whole, however, this structure is a conscious choice; a reflection of the random, scattered nature of real life, in which, as Batuman puts it, ‘events and places follow one another like items on a shopping list … and one thing is guaranteed; they won’t naturally form the shape of a wonderful book.’