Rachel Polonsky

Sentimental Education

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

By

Granta Books 298pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

If this wise and delightfully funny book were a novel, it would be a Bildungsroman. But the fact that it is not a novel is the point. The Possessed is a book about how its author – who starts out wanting ‘to be a writer, not an academic’ – grows up and finds answers to her questions by failing to write a novel and dropping back into graduate school instead:

What if … instead of living your own version of Lost Illusions, in order to someday write the same novel for twenty-first-century America – what if instead you went to Balzac’s house and … read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him – and then started writing?

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The lack of evidence ... of any definitive brain pathology in cases of schizophrenia and the absence of any reliab… ,
    • 'Since Dylan’s commercial and ideological heyday, the intrusion of sociology, semiology and post-structuralist thou… ,
    • 'One of the reasons for its longevity is that it has virtually nothing to say about science and technology at all,… ,
    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    Follow Us