Book review: The Possessed, Elif Batuman

(This review was written at high speed, and I wish I'd done more justice to Batuman's book. The Possessed sent me back to the Russian classics after a decade, and what Batuman does is make you read the books as though you're reading them again for the first time. Review published in the Business Standard, October 2011.)

The Possessed
Elif Batuman
Granta Books/ Farrar Straus Giroux
Rs 753

PG Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialized in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. The Russians draw her in little by little, as she succumbs first to Eugene Onegin, and then to Anna Karenina: “Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified and meaningful in terms of plot.”

Batuman really means to be a novelist, but her creative writing career doesn’t survive the reality of workshops: “Why was it
automatically good for a writer to live in a barn,” she asks, “reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?”

Russia pulls her in gradually; this student of literature, born to Turkish parents and raised in New Jersey, finds herself drawn to study the Russian novelists in Russia, through a series of complicated detours. (One of them involves judging a shapely leg contest for adolescent boys in a village in Hungary. Batuman has a knack for memorable asides.)

As she warms to her accidental subject, she writes: “I stopped believing that theory had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

In Moscow, she dates bankers, for “the first and last time” in her life; elsewhere, she meets Isaac Babel’s formidable, larger-than-life older daughter Nathalie; in St Petersburg, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stay overnight in the replica of an ice palace modeled on the fully furnished House of Ice commissioned by Ivan the Terrible’s niece, a palace that has “no clear purpose, and therefore many unclear purposes”. She lives briefly in Samarkand, where she learns why it is impossible for women to be saints, how to eat lepyushka, and shares with us her readings of the life of the Emperor Bobur (as the name is spelled in those parts) and the fact, unrelated in Indian histories, that he suffered terribly from gemoroi or haemorrhoids.

Behind the exuberance of the travel writing and the conversational digressions, there is also real scholarship (many of these essays were first published in the New Yorker, the LRB and other magazines). At a Tolstoy conference, Batuman argues, only slightly mischievously, that the writer may have been murdered, but the discussion veers off into a heated argument over whether he had or hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland. Dostoevksy’s poor intellectuals, the ones in his book The Possessed who inspired the book’s title, descend into madness as Batuman asks why the Russians required so much grotesquerie.

Just a few decades ago, The Possessed might have been read differently—Russia has slipped from its position as one of the great powers, and perhaps because of that relative erasure from the world stage, the country is once again new territory for a traveler and writer of Batuman’s stamp. She is free to explore it without having to explain it, and free to explain—always obliquely—why the Russians took such a firm grip on her imagination, why their larger-than-life stories were so much more compelling than the stories she had fled from, where “middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions… and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things”.

By the last chapter, where Batuman explores one of Dostoevsky’s more enigmatic works, a novel called Demons, she has taken us halfway across the world and back. Everything that most critics would edit out of their work is here—the backstories, the failed relationships and minor missteps, the cult-like intensity that might sweep a community of academics—perhaps because Batuman knows, and makes the reader see again, the value of digressions and secret histories.

The question that animates this chapter is not really about literature or books or scholarship: what is worth devoting your life to, asks Batuman? She cannot imagine studying, say, Islamic fundamentalism forever; another person might not be able to imagine being a bread-maker in Samarkand.

“If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” The Possessed, peopled with a cast of eccentrics but free of suicidal moujiks, will convince many readers to at least begin that search.

Book review: The Groaning Shelf, by Pradeep Sebastian

(Published in Biblio, July 2011.)

The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book love
Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India,
Rs 395, 295 pages
ISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3

In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might grant you a brief, tantalizing darshan, a quick glimpse of what it meant to be in the presence of the strange god called the Internet.

Pradeep Sebastian and Sven Birkerts occupied very different imaginative spaces in that year. Sebastian, the Hindu’s articulate, incisive, gently brilliant literary columnist, wrote about his love for the printed word, with the accent heavily on the “printed”. First editions, secondhand bookshops, the love of the musty, distinctive scent of books—these were what he celebrated in his column, as much as the richness of literary content.

For Birkerts, 1994 was the year when he published The Gutenberg Elegies, which would become a landmark collection of essays marking the advent of ebooks (and the presumed death of print). The Internet had already changed the way Americans read, understood and processed the world, and Birkerts was one of the first to chart—and comprehend—the order of change upon us. We were shifting from a print culture to an electronic culture, he said, much as there had been a shift, centuries before, from an oral literary culture to a written literary culture. However, this shift would take less than fifty years, not centuries, to come about; and this shift would also involve a transition in how we understood the practice of reading and writing. Birkerts was prescient in many of the fears he expressed in The Gutenberg Elegies—language would erode, becoming less complex; readers would have to “incessantly reposition the self within a barrage of onrushing stimuli”; we would experience a waning of the private self as we became more and more enmeshed in electronic webs.

In just 17 years since Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, these are some of the trends in publishing and reading that have changed. E-books have grown in popularity and availability and e-readers from the Sony E-reader to the Kindle and now the iPad have encountered less resistance than many champions of the book accepted. Language erosion has, according to some experts, happened; but this has also been accompanied by the rise of what might be called e-creoles, often complex sub-dialects used on services like Facebook and Twitter, rich in their own ways of combining symbol, smileys and text, expressive and constantly morphing. Traditional bookstores across the world have been under threat, with independent bookstores and large chains alike going under; the cult of the bestseller and the mass-market paperback dominates a great deal of reading. There is a question mark against the concept of territorial copyright; and there are fears that between them, Google and Amazon might own too much of the world’s electronic libraries and bookstores.

That is, of course, a paragraph of over-simplifications, and it is also a demonstration of the limitations of print. In its current form, flat on the printed page you are reading, the previous paragraph conveys only a limited authorial summary of almost two decades of complex, fascinating and challenging arguments. In its electronic avatar, it would have been possible to link the first sentence to the predictions or analyses of Marshall McLuhan, Zizek or Nicholas Negroponte; to link the second sentence to stories from, say Wired or BoingBoing on the rise of e-reading; to link the third sentence to blogs like Language Hat and Language Log, and so on. Deprived of the backbone of the electronic world, of the potentially intense engagement and architecture of the Internet, what you have left in this paragraph is just an unsatisfactory skeleton. (Note: Since this version is online, I've included some links as illustrations.)



• * *



According to the formidable Nicholas Negroponte, the end of the book in its current, physical avatar is closer than we think—he gives it about five years. Observers of the Indian publishing scene believe we have a little longer than that—the physical book will probably never phase out entirely in a country known for its ability to exist in several centuries simultaneously, and even where it does, the process is likely to take ten to 15 years.

It is in this context that Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf, a compilation of writings on the book and on bibliophilia, must be read. This collection of brief, engaging essays—many of them drawn and reshaped from his columns for The Hindu and the Deccan Herald—is at once a nostalgic elegy for the physical book, and a stirring defence of its virtues. Sebastian represents one end of the ebook-versus-printed book debate; he stands for everyone, every reader and writer, who believes that our world would be diminished if we could no longer hold bound volumes in our hands.

The Groaning Shelf is really the distilled essence of one reader’s love affair with books, complete with the inevitable moments of darkness and disillusion. It opens with a description of a condition common to those who live their lives in reading, publishing and writing—a moment of turning away from reading itself, becoming, in Sebastian’s phrase, “a lapsed reader”. For him, this is the moment when he shifts from a deep engagement with the content of books to a deep fascination with the form. “The pleasures of bibliophily for me lie in fully embracing the book as material object: its bibliographical aspects—binding, edition, condition, rarity, and typography matter to me as much as their literary content.”

In the first few sections, Sebastian moves through all the complex and beloved rituals of the true bibliophile. Like Walter Benjamin, he derives pleasure from unpacking his library, aware that in describing the humble and yet intently engaging process of rearranging books on a shelf, he is joining a long line of writers from Benjamin to Geoff Dyer to Anne Fadiman. Alberto Manguel and Coleridge share his search for the perfect bookshelf; Baudrillard and Sontag help him understand the romantic richness that lies behind the process of becoming a book collector, an obsession that goes beyond the merely acquisitive. First editions—the hunt for them, the joy of possessing an untouched, perfectly preserved first edition of a Nabokov or an RK Narayan—lead him to the very Indian neglect of these aspects of book-love. He will, later, meet Bibi Mohamed, an antiquarian book dealer in Manhattan who is one of the very few experts in her field of Indian origin; and he will also write with some feeling of the relative absence of book history in India.

Perhaps the only disappointing section in this collection is ‘Writers’, which offers a series of short profiles of writers from Pico Iyer to Ayn Rand, Pankaj Mishra to JD Salinger. The short essay form, with some pieces just two or three pages long, works very well with Sebastian’s bibliophilia—by moving from the joys of reading in bed to the tale of obsessive collectors, he creates a map of the reading world, and a timeline of the development of the kind of reader of books Anne Fadiman would have classified as courtly rather than carnal. But while these brief profiles are necessarily limited—they must have been written for magazine or newspaper publication—they work only as introductions, and often leave the reader wanting a great deal more.

This is the danger of any collection of essays by a columnist, especially one as sensitive and as thoughtful as Sebastian—the truncated length of the essays whets the reader’s appetite, but leaves it unsatisfied. Even within these, though, there are moments of recognition and pleasurable insight. Writing about Pico Iyer (“Thomas Merton on a frequent-flier pass”), Sebastian instinctively does what any committed reader will do when he comes to Iyer’s novel Abandon. He places it among its natural family: “Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway—the story of CS Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham—and of another little known, astonishing book titled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken…”

All of his instincts are of this order—the instincts of a disciplined, accomplished reader—and this collection is perhaps the first in many decades in India to celebrate books and reading. The Groaning Shelf has the same directness and ease as Sebastian’s columns: it was written by a reader for other readers, and that is its greatest strength. The moments of serendipity compensate for the inevitable disappointment of wanting more than just this collection of essays, however valuable in themselves; there was a deeper book, the personal history of an Indian reader, waiting to be written, and though it is unfair to criticize Sebastian for not having written it, it is tempting to ask him to write it some day.

As a reader, I am on the other side of the divide from Sebastian, wedded more to the content of books than to their form. Many of us “carnal readers”, to use Fadiman’s elegant division, are fascinated by the promise of the ebook revolution, and are happy to jettison the paraphernalia—the groaning shelves—that accompany being a book lover. Sebastian’s essays are a reminder of courtly love, and all that it can bring: the frisson of learning the arcane terminology of the book trade, the joyous serendipity of browsing in secondhand bookshops and finding what you didn’t know you needed.

Perhaps one of the loveliest essays in The Groaning Shelf is about a visit Sebastian makes to “the bookshop that every bibliophile secretly fantasizes about… an entire bookstore full of just books about books.” Behind that deceptively simple phase lies a lifetime of the love and passion that only the true, dedicated reader knows.

JLF: The Old Woman and The Cats, read by JM Coetzee

“You have held an Indian audience silent for over forty five minutes…”

Of all the discussions, debates and readings at the festival, this was my favourite, because it was such a pure reading. Coetzee offered only a brief introduction, took no questions; this was not the usual ten-minute excerpt, either.
Only poets read a complete piece of work these days, and sometimes playwrights. The fiction author must read in excerpts, offering short takes that s/he hopes will be enough to draw you, the reader, into the rest of the work. To have a complete short story, read by an author like Coetzee, is a gift.

After he read, I was thinking about the unequal relationship between readers and auhors. Seated across the famously silent Coetzee at a dinner hosted by Random House the previous day, I had little to say to him: the author has no time for small talk, and doesn’t like discussing his books, which set certain limits on the conversation. We spoke in brief spurts about vegetarian Indian cuisines, about cats; Neel Mukherjee and he discussed the Naxal movement in India, and then we all returned to our shining thalis of gatte ki subzi and kair sangri.

Aside from my own social shyness, I seldom want to talk to the writers whose work has meant the most to me, because that conversation might be both too personal—the year Waiting For Barbarians changed my life, the year Disgrace changed my thinking—and superfluous, because their works gave me as a reader everything I needed. There are writers you read in one voracious gulp, discovering all their books, and obsessively reading everything, every last short story, every out-take and interview, over the course of two, three years—that was how I’d read Garcia Marquez and Tagore.
Coetzee was, for me, the other kind of writer: you discover their writing in your teens, and then you follow them as the books come out, each new book defining and changing a key part of your twenties and thirties. Coetzee had been my window into understanding violence and estrangement and the remoteness of the human heart, and then later, he became perhaps the only twentieth century writer to include animals into his view of the world—not as characters, but as the co-inhabitants of a world we think of as “peopled”, as silent and often helpless sharers in the actions of humankind.

Here is Coetzee, reading one of his Lessons. The writer Neel Mukherjee explained to me that Coetzee’s Lessons were not limited to Elizabeth Costello, but his preferred way of combining the essay with fiction. This lesson is about cats, and why they don’t have faces; about strays of all kinds, and children, and the relationship between parent and child, about estrangement and, perhaps, love. You must imagine him reading this on the vast, crowded lawns of the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, the afternoon sun bright on our faces, the humans silent and rapt, and only the green parrots punctuating Coetzee’s voice with their swift squawks.

Link: The Old Woman and The Cats, read by Coetzee.

The BS column: The reading life: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru

(Published in the Business Standard, August 17, 2010)




As another August 15 passes by, here’s a thought: what would our country have been like if the leaders of the freedom movement had not been readers?

It’s easier to see them as writers. Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographies, letters and other work have provided gainful occupation for thousands of scholars. Pandit Nehru, incarcerated in jail, bereft of reference books, set pen to paper and produced The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and Letters From A Father To His Daughter. BR Ambedkar’s Who Were The Shudras, Castes in India and the autobiographical Waiting For A Visa still hold the attention of readers.

And it is their progression as writers that historians and thinkers like Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani have written about. But to study the libraries of India’s leaders is to realize how relentlessly, and sometimes restlessly, all of them, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sarojini Naidu, read as a way of understanding the values by which India would be formed.

Gandhi came to English uneasily; the alien tongue made him a virtual prisoner of silence on his shipboard journey to England. In South Africa, as a lawyer who had got over his initial fear of speaking in public, he put together a formidable and eclectic library.

Even a partial list of books on Gandhi’s shelves makes fascinating reading. He read extensively on religion, from Syed Amir Ali on Islam to Moulton on Early Zoroastrianism, and read and re-read the world’s great religious texts. Tolstoy, Thoreau (on the duty of civil disobedience), Max Mueller and Patanjali share companionable space on his shelves.

There is the personal—a book on obstetrics, purchased and read before the birth of his first child, several works on naturopathy, The Vegetarian Messenger, hydrotherapy. In his first year in South Africa, he read “quite eighty books”: most of them on religion. The local histories he read remained influential—an education inspector’s report on Basutoland, for instance, played a key role in Gandhi’s determination to have Indian languages taught in Indian schools.

Nehru was the quintessential privileged reader, with tutors and libraries at home, and later, the libraries of Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge, open to him. His early experiences with the Theosophical Society taught him to read widely—and perhaps skeptically, given his abjuration of organized religion: “an empty form devoid of real content”. Nehru rarely mentioned or quoted the writers he read so voraciously, though one of the books that left a lasting impression on him was Trevelyan’s biography of Garibaldi.

He would, today, be classified as a disciple of Richard Dawkins, the scientist and flagbearer of atheism, and would probably have enjoyed The God Delusion greatly. Long after Nehru had left Trinity and his Tripos in Natural Sciences behind, he continued to read, and enthusiastically recommend, the study of science: “I realized that science was not only a pleasant diversion and abstraction, but was of the very texture of life, without which our modern world would vanish away…”

Ambedkar may have been the most passionate reader of the three. Denied the study of Sanskrit because of his Untouchable status, he had the opportunity to explore his love of books—and the world of empowering ideas they promised—as a young student at Bombay University and then at Columbia. He had mentors in John Dewey and Professor Muller, who lent him books, bought him books and perhaps most crucially, recommended the best of political and socioeconomic thinkers to him. His personal library ran to a vast 50,000 books, representing the range and depth of his interests, from the history of political struggles to Buddhism.

Ambedkar did, according to some scholars, read black protest literature while in America, though he made little direct reference to their works. But here’s an interesting footnote to his history. He wrote to WEB Du Bois, the redoubtable civil rights activist, who took note: “I have on my desk a letter from Dr BR Ambedkar of the Untouchables of India…” Ambedkar made use of his experiences in Slavery Or Untouchability?, arguing that untouchability was far worse as an institution.

But WEB Du Bois had an unusual Indian connection—aside from his friendship with Lala Lajpat Rai, he had penned a romance, Dark Princess, which combined politics and eroticism with admirable economy. In this astonishing work of fiction, Matthew Townes, a doctor discriminated against for his skin colour, meets Princess Kautilya, the beautiful head of an organization of people of colour who plan to overthrow Western imperialism. It ends with the birth of a messiah, “a palpitating bubble of gold”, in tribute to the love between the princess and the idealist.

Whether or not Ambedkar read Dark Princess is, unfortunately, not a matter of historical record. His reactions to a book that included the Ku Klux Klan and a Maharajah of Bwodpur would have been priceless.

Jaipur Literature Festival: Vikram Chandra

On technique: "If you're a writer or a sportsman, if you've ever practiced a sport, you'll notice that at first you get worse. That's because you're becoming aware of the technique involved, whether it's writing or a sport. Then you practice some more and then you get better. There's a balance between learning technique and finding freedom. You do your daily riyaaz, and you try to reach that flow state, and you eventually do reach it."

On meeting gangsters for Sacred Games: "The bigger guys are eager to meet you. They're like corporate heads: there's a PR line they want to feed you. It's the footsoldiers who are harder to meet. (He mentions one gangster who demanded a meeting near the police station in a Bombay suburb.) "He was a hitman who worked very close by. He felt safe around the police station."

On cognitive poetics, his latest obssession: Literary criticism in the west has looked at content, not at the art of reading. Almost nobody has bothered about what the reader feels, the emotions of the reader as you encounter this text. But when you read a written text, you're making up your own narratives. And cognitive poetics, through specific studies, has shown that when you read a story, there are specific inflexion points--the points of greatest emotional impact in the narrative. It's exciting to me to think that they could be mapped."

Later, Chandra mentions Brian Boyd, and his theories of story--especially the theory that story telling is an adaptive evolutionary behaviour. Here's a link to a review of Boyd's work.