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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The adventures of a reader: Encounters with Elif Batuman
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The adventures of a reader: Encounters with Elif Batuman

The Turkish-American author on Pamuk, Tolstoy and maintaining a balance between reading and living

Author Elif Batuman during the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival. Photo: Mahesh Acharya (Mahesh Acharya)Premium
Author Elif Batuman during the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival. Photo: Mahesh Acharya
(Mahesh Acharya)

Pure serendipity is how I would describe my encounters with Elif Batuman, first in my reading life, and then in real life.

I chanced upon her ‘Diary’ in the London Review of Books last year, in which she wrote luminously about her visit to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, the Nobel Laureate’s fond memorial to his own novel of the same name. Although I was profoundly moved by the first hundred-odd pages of The Museum of Innocence, the lump in my throat soon turned into a thorn in my side as I read on. I found Kemal, Pamuk’s lovelorn protagonist, becoming unbearably self-indulgent with every passing page, and the very thought of him obsessively clinging on to the relics of his late beloved’s earthly possessions filled me with morbid feelings until Batuman’s essay—light but full of learning, wonderfully wise but witty—made me think of the novel in a more charitable light.

In her piece, Batuman discusses Pamuk’s troublesome relationship with his past and his present and situates the novel in a context that makes you think of a book you’ve loathed (or loved) in a totally unexpected way. This is the kind of epiphany that only the best literary commentators can bring you. But Batuman’s gift also included a mastery over the form of the personal essay, and the subtlety with which she mingled autobiography with criticism, reminded me of my hero, Charles Lamb.

In the opening lines of the essay she tells us about moving to Turkey in 2010 from California, where she had lived for 11 years: “I had been offered a job as writer in residence at a private university in the forest on the northern edge of Istanbul. When I got there, I found out that the university had no writer in residence programme. It didn’t even have a writing programme. There was just me. The two living beings I saw with the most regularity were a campus groundsman, who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot of furniture, which had come with the apartment."

This endearing self-portrait came back to me when I ran into Batuman on the first day of this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. She had just finished her session on globalizing Shakespeare, in which she had spoken about how Hamlet had seeped into the thoughts of a group of women in rural Turkey, who have never seen a play before, and had found a strange incarnation in the form of a new adaptation. I was least expecting to interview Batuman at this point, but journalists, even those of the literary kind, at the JLF do not have the luxury to sit with authors over a leisurely cup of tea and have a long conversation about the problems of life and literature. So we got hold of coffee in paper cups and sat on faux gilded chairs under a tree and had a little chat.

One of the first things that I thought of, after listening to her talk about Hamlet invading the minds of Turkish women, was the title of her only book so far: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian books and the People Who Read Them (2010). In this book, Batuman talks about her life as a graduate student of comparative literature, with a special interest in the Russian novel, and the adventures she had as a reader of these classics. It is understandable that Batuman, who was born to Turkish parents in New York, should want to go back to Turkey but would it not have been more natural for her to spend time in Russia, I ask her.

“I would have loved to spend a long time in Russia, but the longest time I was there for was a semester, though I went back for short trips," she tells me. “It’s often difficult to get a visa to go there." Literature, of course, knows no boundaries. “That’s really one of the stories I wanted to tell in The Possessed," says Batuman, “That love is a gift, you don’t get to choose its object. I fell in love with novels, but Turkey does not have a novel tradition. I grew up during the Cold War in America, and Russia was this place which was the exact opposite. It was mysterious. You didn’t know what was going on there. It was like a puzzle to me when I was little. There were also similarities between Turkey and Russia. Parallels have been drawn between Peter the Great and Ataturk, in terms of their modernizing projects, which I think is a valid comparison."

Turkey today has one of the greatest living novelists, and for most of the literate world Orhan Pamuk is now synonymous with Turkey. “Yes, I think Pamuk consciously set out to create a Turkish novel tradition in an enormous hurry," agrees Batuman. But she is more of a “Tolstoy person", who did “cinematic, sweeping panoramas of different kinds of people," whereas Dostoyevsky, for her, is a sparer writer, one who gets inside your head and does strange things to it. In fact, one of the questions that kept popping up in my head as I read The Possessed was the problem of reading and living, how can one live enough as well as read as much, without letting the one take over the other.

“It was one of the questions I addressed in my thesis," says Batuman, who focused on Proust and James, among other authors, in her dissertation. We talk about the dangers of reading too much James and Nabokov, how they put you into a slow time, the way their magnificent sentences tend to infect your style. But given her novelistic style, it feels quite natural that she should write a novel now, I offer gingerly. “Actually, I originally wanted to do The Possessed as a novel, but non-fiction and memoir are more in vogue in America," she tells me, before informing me, to my great joy, “As it happens, I sold my first novel six months ago. It’s not written yet, unfortunately, but it is supposed to come out in 2015.

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Published: 25 Jan 2013, 04:33 PM IST
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