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Yesterday I was in the bookstore and found a book The Possessed by Elif Batuman a young woman from Stanford. it's subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Elif+Batuman&x=11&y=16
It brought back so many memories of grad school in Russian. Not just the thought processes, but the people I met and dealt with every day. One reviewer started off by saying, "Are comical things more likely to happen to funny people, or is funniness simply the ability to make ordinary things seem comical?" Believe me, the events she writes about are anything but ordinary. But every last one of us who got very far into grad school Russian and thought ourselves otherwise very ordinary, had stories just like hers. The changes in book from the funny insanity of her everyday life to the dead seriousness of her literary criticism and back, were exactly what all of us dealt with. Batuman may have grown up in a Turkish family, studied Comparative Lit instead of just Russian,and lived her life mostly in places I've never been. But I read one chapter and said to myself out loud, "she's my people!" The New Tork Times review http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/books/17book.html gives a taste of what the book is like.
I enjoyed it very much, and I recommend it to anyone who can't imagine how I ended up so strange.
It brought back so many memories of grad school in Russian. Not just the thought processes, but the people I met and dealt with every day. One reviewer started off by saying, "Are comical things more likely to happen to funny people, or is funniness simply the ability to make ordinary things seem comical?" Believe me, the events she writes about are anything but ordinary. But every last one of us who got very far into grad school Russian and thought ourselves otherwise very ordinary, had stories just like hers. The changes in book from the funny insanity of her everyday life to the dead seriousness of her literary criticism and back, were exactly what all of us dealt with. Batuman may have grown up in a Turkish family, studied Comparative Lit instead of just Russian,and lived her life mostly in places I've never been. But I read one chapter and said to myself out loud, "she's my people!" The New Tork Times review http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/books/17book.html gives a taste of what the book is like.
I enjoyed it very much, and I recommend it to anyone who can't imagine how I ended up so strange.