From Russia with love

MEMOIR: BRIDGET HOURICANreviews The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read ThemBy Elif Batuman Granta, 290pp. £16.99

THE LEGENDARY drama critic Kenneth Tynan recorded in his diary an Elizabethan pun that he had coined in a dream: "Man has no solace, because he is solus." I guess he thought this too clever not to record. You know you're an obsessive bibliophile when you start dreaming literary puns.

In this book Elif Batuman records two dreams: in the first she's playing tennis against Tolstoy. She has a goose for a racket, so serves "in a flurry of grey down"; Tolstoy has a normal racket, and "his mighty backhand projects the ball far beyond the outermost limits of the tennis lawn". She then hands her goose to Chekhov to take over the game. Watching, she solves the nagging enigma of Tolstoy's play The Living Corpse: it's about Chekhov – he'sthe living corpse! The second dream is even more bibliomaniacal: she dreams that the cover of an Uzbek novel, called Past Days, is dotted with blurbs from anglophone critics – FR Leavis's blurb reads: "Kicking this book will cause pages nineteen and twenty to stick together. (In the paperback edition, the stuck pages will be fourteen and fifteen.)"

The zaniness of Batuman's dreams (sorry, that's tautology) sets the tone for this book: it's absurdist. She's ostensibly concentrating on four Great Russian Writers – Babel, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov – but her presiding geniuses (though she barely mentions them) are the surrealists Gogol and Bulgakov. The other influence (whom she does mention) is Lewis Carroll – in fact the goose racket derived, as she admits, from Aliceplaying croquet with a flamingo. But as Nabokov translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandinto Russian, and as life in Russia is more surreal than in Europe, Alicecan probably be regarded as a seminal Russian text.

Batuman fell in love with Russian literature in her teens. This is a very common experience, a rite of passage even, for avid readers. Batuman remembers where she was when she first read Anna Karenina: on her grandmother's "rose-coloured velvet sofa" in Ankara. I remember where I was when I first read The Brothers Karamazov: on a beach in the Algarve. Both of us were reading about the Russian winter in incongruously hot weather; perhaps this added to the pleasure and the strangeness. Anyway, Russian literature is like the Jesuits: if it catches you young enough you're caught for life.

Batuman spent seven years wrestling with Russian at Stanford University, in California (more hot weather). The Possessed– the title comes from a late Dostoevsky novel as well as referring to Batuman's possession by Russian literature – is part memoir, part literary criticism, part travelogue, a manic trip through conferences and language classes in Russia and former Soviet states.

It's a hilarious trip. Batuman has a deadpan, detached, absurdist style rather like Jon Ronson. (She's a Turkish New Yorker who writes for the New Yorker, and I don't know if she's read Ronson.) She's a master of the laconic quote:

People were usually surprised to hear that chain-smoking, hard-drinking Matej came from a seriously Catholic family. He was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters spaced out over fifteen years.

“Man, that is one long history of your dad banging your mom!” yelled one of the weird characters who followed Matej everywhere – a Portuguese mathematician who I think had a mild form of Tourette’s.

“I’m glad to see you have an accurate grasp of the mechanism,” Matej replied.

Note that Portuguese mathematician. Batuman has found the perfect locale for absurdism: academia. Language workshops and conferences are Kafkaesque: narrow-minded people with obsessive concerns pop up muttering earnest thoughts on arcane matters. And of course, as Swift discovered in Lilliput, the smaller the concern, and the graver the discussion, the funnier it all gets. Why don’t more comics mine academia? Because they lack the entry-level intellect, I guess – you do have to be able to deliver a paper. Batuman speaks at least four languages and has written a dissertation on double-entry book-keeping in the novel (whatever that is). But her main concern, like Kingsley Amis before her, is to exploit the faculty for comic purposes.

I totally get her humour. So why did I spend half the book thinking, sourly, of a Johnny Rotten question: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Because the title and introduction led me to believe the intricacies of Russian literature were about to be revealed. She speaks Russian; I don’t. I was counting on her reports from the front line.

It's not that she isn't illuminating. Here's her note on Anna Karenina: "Anna's lover and her husband had the same name (Alexei). Anna's maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna's son and Levin's half-brother were both Sergei. The repetition of names struck me as remarkable, surprising, and true to life." This is an illuminating, typically quirky observation. But Batuman isn't really interested in elucidating Russian literature. There is much more biography here – did Chekhov play the piano? – than textual analysis. And she gives the game away in the intro: she wanted to write a novel, couldn't get ahead with it, then realised she could write a book about novels, which is what this is.

Like all good raconteurs, she knows how to spin a tale. When her suitcase goes missing on the way to a conference at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, was she really down to wearing the same flip-flops, sweatpants and flannel shirt for four days, making the other conferencegoers think she was a Tolstoyan who had taken the master’s vow to dress as a peasant? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. Batuman has written an absurdist, picaresque adventure, where the line between Russian fiction and her own story is blurred. She is consistently surprising and entertaining. Just don’t expect a treatise on the symbolism of cherry blossom.

Elif Batuman will read at Cúirt International Festival of Literature, in Galway, on Friday, April 15th

Bridget Hourican is a freelance journalist and historian. Her book for teenagers, The Bad Karma Diaries, has just been published by the O'Brien Press