The Gaudiloquence of Elif Batuman

I'd been looking forward to Elif Batuman's collection of essays about life studying Russian books, The Possessed, for quite some time, on the strength of the introductory essay which I linked to on this blog a few months ago. This despite the fact that I am shamefully underread in Russian literature.

The book is much as you would expect it to be based on that one piece. It's self-centred and occasionally overly precious, but I loved it anyway.

It's a bit uneven. The American and Russian sections are wonderful; Batuman can be an incredibly funny writer as well as a very moving one, and when she writes about things she knows and loves she's a joy to read. The Samarkand sections though, despite being set in Samarkand, do not work for me. Apparently Batuman did not enjoy her time there, and so from the fond humour of the other sections we move abruptly toward this sort of thing:

The Uzbek soccer fans' lack of identification with the Turkish national team was what finally made me see that Uzbekistan wasn't a middle point on some continuum between Turkishness and Russianness. Uzbekistan was more like a worse-off Turkey, with an even more depressing national literature. Even I, who was always making fun of Orhan Pamuk, could see that if Pamuk were magically ceded over to the Uzbeks, they would have cause for a national holiday.

On the whole, though, the sheer, joyous love that informs most of the book makes up for moments like this. It's not perfect, but it's highly recommended.

An edited version of the (tragically short) piece below appeared in Saturday's Indian Express.

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In her introduction to The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman says of Cervantes' Don Quixote that he “had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book”. The Possessed is a collection of essays which shows Batuman herself doing much the same thing, immersing herself in books, looking for parallels and answers to her lived experiences. Describing her own transformation into a literature student she asks “wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?” Batuman speaks eloquently and joyfully of love and the experience of being obsessed.

This is not a book about Russian literature, but about Batuman's love of it and her developing relationship with it. Batuman claims that what first attracted her to the Russians was a sense of half-understanding and absurdity, and this is reflected in the strange and hilarious forms that her study of the language takes. It is (like any love story) completely self-indulgent.

In “Babel in California” a conference on Isaac Babel descends into chaos. “Who Killed Tolstoy?” has her wandering around Tolstoy's estates as part of an investigation into Tolstoy's “murder” (a subject chosen more for the purposes of funding than for any beliefs the author might have). Missing suitcases, unrepentant airport staff (“are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”) and incontinent old gentleman all play a part in a comic piece that also speaks thoughtfully of death.

“Summer in Samarkand” is divided into three parts that are scattered throughout the book. These sections do not deal directly with Russian literature – the essays are an account of a summer spent learning Uzbek – yet Batuman's commentaries on Uzbek language and literature are very much in keeping with the rest of the book. If they jar with the rest of the book it is more because of the tone of humour. The affectionate delight in absurdity that characterises the portions of the book set in America and Russia is gone, and the writing suffers as a result.

The last piece, “The Possessed”, is named after a Dostoevsky novel and makes clear its parallels with Batuman's graduate school circle. Things come together, and characters mentioned in passing in earlier essays come into focus. This is the darkest section of the book. Yet Batuman concludes “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.” And if there are no answers, Batuman shows us that love can still be an end in itself.

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The Indian Blogger's Genre Confusion

A Mills & Boon book has confused me.

As anyone who has ever read one knows, M&B publish short, uncomplicated romance novels. There are various subgenres (see Doctors or Sheikhs), but most of these books stick to a reasonably basic pattern, with minor variations that have set in with time. Some that come to mind: sex/no sex, sexism/less sexism, virgins/unfulfilled divorcees or widows/women who have had previous happy relationships. The pattern is as follows: man and woman meet – man is masterful and probably richer – there is antagonism – feelings develop – there is a misunderstanding – it all ends happily.

A successful Mills & Boon novel sticks to this model. It may be written well or badly, but once the name (and long-stemmed rose logo) of the publisher are on the book, this is all you expect it to be doing. And expectations do inform how one reads a text, what one looks for, and how one judges it.

Which leads to a (to me, interesting) question. Consider a hypothetical situation in which a book contains all the plot elements I mention above, but aspires to do more than simply tell the story which the reader of this genre wants and expects to read. Imagine this book is published under the Mills & Boon brand, with the same sort of title, the same sort of cover as the rest of the company's output. How do you read and judge it?

It is unlikely that this situation would ever actually occur. M&B would not be the first publisher of choice for an author who sought to do something different, since the name would not attract the sorts of customers who might be interested. Plus it might alienate their existing buyers. As a romance reader I'm quite conservative myself, and can well imagine that a sizeable chunk of readers in the genre feel the same.

But reading Susan Stephens' The Italian Prince's Proposal I have to wonder if this is that book.
On the surface it contains all the conventions of the genre - the title follows the "the something someone's something" pattern of many recent titles. The plot involves a hot, arrogant prince who needs to marry quickly and chooses a pretty English girl who is desperate for the money. Love happens. They fight. She returns to England. They are reconciled. So far so familiar.

Except it isn't. Right from the start something feels off about this story, and then, around the 100th page, it all gets rather surreal. There is a sequence where both characters are half asleep and walking around the house, popping into each other's bedrooms to take a look. There is a dreamlike sequence involving grape-treading (apparently the quantities of grape juice everyone is breathing lead to headiness). In my head this is actually all very filmable and could be gorgeous, but it would not be a realist movie. In this book, it feels completely out of place.

Add to this the gardener, an endearing old man who gives the heroine wise advice (and turns out to be the king) . His inclusion gives the story some of the feel of a fable. And then there's the fact that the entire plot (what there is of it) revolves around the musician sister's need to own a famous violin. It's all very weird. With all this going on, the terrible plot seems like an afterthought.

At no point in the reading of this book did I find it particularly enjoyable. And I'm wondering now how much this had to do with the fact that it was sold to me (where "sold" involves stealing things from my mother's bathroom) as a Mills & Boon book. Would I have found some merit in it if it had a different sort of jacket? Or was it just fundamentally bad?

May Reading

My reading this month included a number of books I'd read before and quite a bit of fluff (these two mostly overlapped). In addition to the books mentioned here, I'm still dipping in and out of Helen Merrick's wonderful book The Secret Feminist Cabal. I've also just gotten hold of Gwyneth Jones' Imagination/Space, also published by Aqueduct (here's a good review). And I'm in the middle of a reread of Mark Charan Newton's Nights of Villjamur. I'll be reading City of Ruin when I'm done. Other books I'm hoping to finish in June include Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (I started it today and love it so far) and Elif Batuman's The Possessed, which I first heard of a few months ago when Batuman wrote this gorgeous piece for the Chronicle. Assuming that her writing is generally of this calibre, this looks like being a remarkable book.

And so on to the books (in no particular order).



G.V Desani - All About H. Hatterr: I started reading this in April. I loved it; it's challenging and playful and generally wonderful. I wrote more about it here.


Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart: I wanted to like this a lot more than I ended up doing. It's incredibly smart, frequently very funny (the brothers' theological debates in particular), and I absolutely love the cover art. And yet somehow it just did not click for me. I may be missing something obvious, since most reviews I've read of it have been overwhelmingly positive. I can't pinpoint anything that the book did wrong (except maybe the cod academic framework which felt wholly unnecessary) so clearly we were just not meant to be. I will say this for Bullington, his writing is effective. He managed to make me feel rather queasy on two occasions. There's one particularly unpleasant rape scene, and another scene that I do not wish to spoil for anyone, but between this and Paul Jessup's "It Tasted Like the Sea" I may never eat fish again.


O. Douglas - Olivia in India: Someone on a mailing list that I read mentioned O. Douglas and I looked her up. I was rather surprised to find that she was John Buchan's sister. A couple of her books were available on project Gutenberg, and I picked this one to start with. I was a bit wary of a book written in 1912 about an Englishwoman's travels in India, but found myself charmed anyway. The book is a series of letters from a young woman (who is travelling to India to meet her brother) to an unnamed young man. The colonialism is inevitable, but for the time surprisingly not offensive. Olivia actually engages with India, which is rather nice. Occasionally the attempt to be charming and quirky gets a bit much, but on the whole this was very likeable indeed.


Rick Riordan - The Percy Jackson series: I finally watched the Percy Jackson movie and while it was pretty good I felt that the pacing was off and it was a lot less clever than the books. This made me reread all five books in the series as well as Percy Jackson: The Demigod Files, a slimmer volume containing three short stories and some mock interviews of characters in the series. The series is fantastic; The Demigod Files is insubstantial.


Georgette Heyer - Frederica: I read Heyer when I'm tired, which is why some of her stuff seems to pop up here every month or so. Frederica is not her best, but it is quite good and has a hot air balloon and steam engines. Which makes it practically steampunk, right? Right?


Lisa Kleypas - Suddenly You: This was recommended by a friend who thought I would enjoy a Victorian publishing romance. It was nice and started off very well indeed. But I felt it threw out a number of lures for places that the story could possibly go, and then went nowhere. It's a little unfair to judge a romance novel for not being more than a romance novel so I can't really blame it for failing to take up the publishing angle, or the child abuse angle, or... (there were quite a few such angles). But I would have liked a better structured plot, at least.


China Miéville - Kraken: My review is here. My reaction was largely positive, but with a few caveats. Watching Miéville having fun and being a geek was nice.


Mark Mellon - Napoleon Concerto: I'm supposed to review this for someone so I won't say much here. This is an alternate history steampunk novel set in Napoleonic France. I'll be linking to my review when it is up.


Nick Mamatas - Under My Roof: I am a bit of a Mamatas fangirl, for various reasons. This probably means that I am biased, but I loved this book to pieces. It's a hilarious, slim book about a telepathic 12 year old whose father has built his own nuclear weapon (it's inside a garden gnome on the lawn) and declared independence from the United States. It's very smart and very political and entirely lovable and I'm surprised more people have not read it.


Julia Quinn - The Bridgerton Series: I did not reread all of the Bridgerton books this month. I read four; The Viscount Who Loved Me, An Offer from a Gentleman, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton and To Sir Philip with Love. There's not much to say about these - none of them was a particularly strenuous intellectual exercise. But I love Quinn and I'm really looking forward to Ten Things I Love About You (review here).


Jon Courtenay Grimwood - Pashazade: Another alternate-history novel. Ashraf Bey arrives in Al Iskandriya and is immediately embroiled in a murder mystery. Fast paced and clever and massively entertaining. I suspect I'd need a second read to attempt any sort of critique (and I think there are aspects of it that could do with some examining) but I found it extremely enjoyable.


John Gardner - Grendel: I recently confessed on twitter that I had not read this, though I'd meant to for a while. The recommendations of a couple of people who had read it convinced me not to put it off any longer. I'm glad, it's stunning. There's not enough space here for anything like a review - and since I finished it only a couple of days ago I think I'd like some time to think about it and possibly return to Beowulf - but it's a glorious book.


Georgette Heyer - Lady of Quality and Black Sheep: These two books are the same book: discuss.