Rachel Polonsky
Sentimental Education
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
By Elif Batuman
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?
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