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.

La sua cantante

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001)

I feel like there was this period right around my college graduation where everyone on BART was reading The Poisonwood Bible and Bel Canto. I never got around to the former (though I've read other Barbara Kingsolver) but came across a copy of the latter, so after sitting on my shelf for awhile, it made it onto my list of books to read this year. And I'm glad - it made for a particularly nice antidote to the anxiety of White Noise.

While reading, I kept finding myself thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This novel presented a scenario almost the opposite. A group of commandos, terrorists, guards, set against their hostages, or prisoners. And unlike the escalating cruelty that occurred in the basement of Jordan Hall, the story of the two groups stuck in the Vice Presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American country is one of relationships built and humanity in ascendancy. Over the weeks and months of confinement, they create a new reality, to the point that several never really want it to end - and even fewer are willing to admit the only possible way that it can end.

This raises a few questions. Does the initial power imbalance account for the differences? At Stanford, you have a group of peers, randomly assigned positions of power or subjection. In Patchett's novel, the prisoners represent the powerful and privileged, and in a sense swing the pendulum back to an original state as the authority of the generals slowly (or rapidly?) erodes. Or is it a timing issue? Zimbardo called things off after 6 days, when they got out of control. In the novel, the situation drags on for months. After 5 days, the guards and generals are still very much in power. Had the Stanford Prison Experiment lasted longer, would relationships have been forged and equilibrium restored? And of course, it's useful to remember that I'm talking about a novel and not real life.

Anyway, at one point in the reading, the phrase "recklessly beautiful" came to mind. I don't know exactly what I mean, but it seems appropriate. The characters fall prey to beauty - to the beauty of music, of love. Their embrace of it leads them to live recklessly, carelessly. Not in their actions per se, but in their suspension of disbelief, that this world could continue, or that things could all come out all right in the end.

So you're left with this mesmerizing story, that invites you too to set aside the dark undertones, to ignore the threatening moment. And believe, for a few pages, in something magical. You can know in the end that the system always wins, and still believe that maybe this time it won't. Or that even when it does, the interlude made it worth it.

[Also, the characters! They are treated with a lot of love. I should have allotted them more time. It's the minor characters that made the book: the vice president turned cleaning crew, the French ambassador, the loud and romantic and ridiculous Russians, the singing terrorist, the chess-playing general. They sound so cheesy when reduced to these terms. They were not.]

Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.

Charlotte

On my mom's advice, I read Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and did a term paper on Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When I was in 11th grade. I'm not really sure I was ready for the Merry Pranksters. But I really enjoyed it. And I got a big kick out of Tom Wolfe's style.

And The Right Stuff became one of my favorite books of all time. Despite being more "masculine" in style than most things I like, it was just so powerful and evocative - and history! - and I loved it.

But Wolfe's social commentary fiction? Not so much. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man in Full. Because I did. But man, Wolfe can come off as so judgmental. It can be a little much.

Which brings me to I am Charlotte Simmons. I was afraid of this book, b/c Wolfe spent a semester at Stanford while I was there, walking around in his white suit and clearly researching such important terms as "hooking up" and "dormcest." And even though talking heads kept comparing his fictional Dupont College to Duke, I knew that it had a whole lot of Stanford in there. And I wasn't in the mood to be judged. Not on my alma mater.

And speaking of my alma mater, I felt as though Wolfe laid me totally bare within 10 pages, when a drunken frat boy expounds on the "exaltation" of being recognized as a Dupont student:

Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life - yet nobody had ever captured that feeling in words, and God knows no Dupont man, or Dupont woman, for that matter, had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul, not even to others within this charming aristocracy. They weren't fools, after all.

And that's it exactly.

I was able to forgive the plot implausibilities and fixation on the word "rutting" and annoying self-pity throughout the rest of the novel (which is a fun read btw, in a very longguilty pleasure sort of way) because Wolfe had captured that feeling so completely.

The Secret Life of Books

Normally I don't have that much patience for essays about how "readerly" a person is - I kind of find it annoying. Maybe because I like to believe that I'm an iconoclast, and whenever other people proclaim their allegiance to books I'm like "uh, poseur" or "oh, maybe I'm not so unique."

But for whatever reason, I was touched by Dana Gioia's essay in a recent issue of Stanford magazine. It's about his childhood as a reader - definitely going against the grain in his immigrant, working-class community. And the way that reading opened new vistas. I had already learned that Gioia is a reader by compulsion, but was nonetheless moved by his phraseology:

every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex and important. The books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order. Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much. They serve as our intimate companions. Some books guide us. Others lead us astray. A few rescue or redeem us. All of them confide something of the wonder, joy, terror and mystery of being alive.

I've argued with others whether it's better to observe or do. I usually end up feeling like I'm losing out by liking to read my adventures rather than live them. But Gioia argues that the lives we read are our own and intensely real as well, something I've felt intuitively but not heard often enough from others. So despite the fact that he is part of the Administration as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, he gets a little star from Erin's Library.