Petersburg, to mastering old Uzbek, with its 70 words for duck and 100 words for crying. In “The Possessed,” Batuman detailed how her obsession with Russian novels carried her afield - to graduate school, to Samarkand and St. Novels are about other novels - and how they make us suffer, she wrote in her 2010 essay collection, “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” They are about “the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.” Thomas Jefferson blamed literature for encouraging “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” But it is this very power - to inspire us to insist a flock of sheep is an opposing army - that is literature’s true subject, according to the critic and journalist Elif Batuman.
The novel’s ability to seduce readers with its alternate, and invariably more attractive, versions of reality was much lamented in the 19th century. Jo March - unforgivably - marriage to an insufferable pedant and surrender of all creative ambitions. Emma Bovary to debt, seedy affairs and protracted death by arsenic.
Don Quixote succumbs to delusions, debt and sundry humiliations. Consider the fates of our most famous bibliomaniacs. $27.Ī strange thing about novels is how often, and strenuously, they proclaim the dangers of novel-reading.
0 kommentar(er)
