Review of THE POSSESSED
Bright and sparkly and confused?
I listened to 70% of this on Audible, read by the writer. She bewitched me. The book didn’t as much, she did. I read another 20% and skimmed the rest. I do not know how to think about this precocious, brilliant but strange writer. Is she a novelist? Can she write about anything but herself? Would it be a cool thing to take her class? She calls her books novels … really? These are memoirs with dialogue. She is smart as “rat shit” but you know that right away and want her to do more with it. Much of it is brilliance caught in a very small bottle. Her friends are frightening but then most academics in their young, hubristic, and insouciant years usually are. Her treatment of Russian writers too often retreats into the wilderness of graduate study obscurity but often is the best thing she writes. Smart, confusing … and irrelevant?? Sounds like most people’s dismissal of intellectuals. I guess I am disappointed but still hooked a bit with that voice and what it promises. Her most recent book, Either/Or, inspired by her infatuation with Kierkegaard (aren’t we all?), has received off the chart reviews. I read 100 pages and stopped. I don’t get it. I would like to but maybe she is a generational “bridge too far”.
THE POSSESED
Elif Batuman
2010 344 pages