Russian! Books! Stanford!

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

This book has a whole bunch of things I love:

• A regular New Yorker contributor as author
• Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
• Russian books and Russian history
• A good sense of humor

Once upon a time (sometime late 2000 through 2001), Roz Chast did a cartoon for the New Yorker that was a series of "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader for playing spoiler to Al Gore. I remember this well because my ex-boyfriend was apoplectic about this. As a result, I never see her work without thinking of that. And here she is, with the cover design, this of lots of wild-eyed readers and one manic, dancing book. But all of this is besides the point because...

Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.

I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."

"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.

Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:

...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."

Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.

Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.

A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.

I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.

The Black Book - Part 2, where nothing gets clearer

The Black Book - Part 2
(Post on Part 1 here)

This book was hard work, people. I kept wondering why I struggled so much. But it really is hard to know whether the narrator's voice is Galip, Celâl, or someone else entirely. Plus, what is real, and what is imaginary? Plus are the cultural references -particularly the literary ones - accurate, and would they be familiar to Turkish readers? So much of the novel is an exploration of identity, of authenticity and masks and doubles. Therefore the confusion is intention, I think.

I felt much better when I got to the afterword by translator Maureen Freely, where she discusses the challenges of rendering Turkish prose in English. She paraphrases poet Murat Nemet-Nejat, who called Turkish "a language that can evoke a thought unfolding" and asks "How to do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?" How, indeed.

But anyway, after slogging through so much of the novel, I found it picked up speed at the end. Galip is still searching for his wife, Rüya, and Celâl. Somehow, while pursuing "clues," he assumes Celâl's identity, and finds himself fending off a very impassioned reader. His actions don't make sense, but then, when do anyone's? And as the chapters with "Celâl's" columns continue, we end up seeing deeper into Galip and Rüya's marriage.

A few things, indicative of the broader themes:

• Celâl refers to Turkey as "a country where everything was a copy of something else" - to the point that a group unknowingly replicates the murder from a Dostoyevsky novel.
• Pamuk/Celâl opens a chapter with Coleridge: " 'Aye!' (quoth the delighted reader). 'This is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the ver same a hundred times myself!' In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him."
• A prince spends 6 years just reading, the happiest time of his life. Except because his thoughts and dreams were the authors', not his own, he was never really himself.

I've loved Pamuk since My Name is Red, but haven't read nearly enough. Apparently, this is where it all started. Per Freely, "The Black Book is the cauldron from which [his later works, like Red] come."

Fugue state in Istanbul

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk (Vintage International, 2006)
(originally published in Turkey in 1990)

Part One
I might be using the word "fugue" wrong, but whatevs. One thing I've noticed is that for all I love Orhan Pamuk, I really haven't read all that much by him. I am slowly trying to remedy this shortfall.

So far this novel reminds me of nothing so much as Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which I read last summer. In both, a wife has "disappeared," and in both the husband's search takes on fantastical qualities and I find myself utterly unable to determine what, if anything, is real. Instead of trying to puzzle it out, I am instead just letting Pamuk's prose wash over me. It's too difficult to be an entirely passive reading experience, but it's less active than one might expect.

There are moments when I found myself making connections to his other work. For example, how much did Galip's opinion of detective novels come into play when he later wrote My Name is Red:

the only detective book he'd ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer's identity. Instead of decorating the story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author's imagination.

And then I found that I utterly understand what Pamuk meant when in this putative column by Celâl:

But as I watched this person from the outside, as if in a dream, I was, in fact, not at all surprised to see that this person was none other than myself. What surprised me was the strength, the implausible tenderness, of my affection for him. I could see at once how fragile and pitiful he was [...]. Only I knew this person was not as he seemed, and I longed to take this unfortunate creature - this mere mortal, this temperamental child - under my wing, be his father or prehaps his god.

Lastly, for now, how can you argue this: "It was stories that kept them going."

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

I love you, Orhan Pamuk

The Nobel Laureate, on what it's like to have won: "I recommend it to everyone."
(from KQED's Forum)

Re-discoveries, Russian style (part 2)

One of my favorite things about Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden is saying Baden-Baden out loud. And that really proves what a big dork I am b/c there is so much to like about this novel.

I first learned about it sometime in the fall of 2001, when Susan Sontag wrote about it in the New Yorker. It was a lost novel, written in the 1970s Soviet Union in secret. Sontag gushed, and provided the introduction for the English translation. (Kudos to the translators, Roger and Angela Keys, who must have had their hands full, but more on that later.) I haven't read much Sontag, so couldn't know whether our tastes aligned, but this was one of the best book recommendations I've ever gotten. (That same fall, the New Yorker also turned me on to Orhan Pamuk and My Name is Red - there must have been some sort of perfect storm of literary taste-making.)

Tsypkin - more or less - is one main character of the novel; he's on a train to Leningrad, reading the diary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's wife Anna. At the same time, Fyodor and Anna are traveling to Baden-Baden, Germany, to take the waters. Also, Dostoyevsky falls prey to a gambling addiction, a humiliating run-in with Ivan Turgenev, and some epileptic fits. It becomes painfully clear how difficult - and yet still rewarding - it must have been to be Anna, amanuensis and caretaker. Reading the final pages of the book (in the sunshine out behind my Berkeley apartment - memorable for whatever reason), tears came to my eyes. I was in love with this book.

Like Dostoyevsky, Tsypkin shows a great eye for detail, demonstrating the Russian realism that was warped into Soviet socialist realism. And as is much easier to do in Russian than English (but done, thanks to the Keys's), he employs run-on sentences and paragraphs, building clauses upon one another for a rich layered effect. Plus Tsypkin - most likely typical for any thinking Soviet citizen of his era - is keenly aware of the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime.

To sum up, Summer in Baden-Baden is extraordinary.

Yay!!!

I'm on my way to my college reunion, but first:

Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature

The NY Times article lede:

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose uncommon lyrical gifts and uncompromising politics have brought him acclaim worldwide and prosecution at home, won the Nobel literature prize Thursday for his works dealing with the symbols of clashing cultures.

And the Swedish Academy:

in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.

More thoughts coming soon...