dbjorlin's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars. I'm mesmerized by Batuman's writing but find long stretches of her stories a bit too inscrutable/self-referential.
chauf's review against another edition
3.0
I expected more from this book than the author had to offer. Parts of it are very funny and probably typical for the life of a graduate student. Other parts of the books reminded me of fellow students who spend their time spitting out the names of famous literary theorists and critics and expect to be applauded by everybody who hears them.
annirox16's review against another edition
may come back — just not super into it rn!!
meredithw20's review against another edition
3.0
Ahahahahahahahaha you guys this book was delightful. I didn't even care about picking through the weedier sections, because Elif frames the seemingly stultifying pursuit of this, uh, singular field of study with personal narrative and colorful supporting characters. I especially like that she writes with a curiously Wodehousian voice, rife with that sort of head-cocked, long-suffering hyperspecificity. I read lots of those moments aloud to my very patient boyfriend.
You know, I find myself sometimes wishing that I read more literary analysis, needing somehow to dissect rather than consume (and, tbh, high-school minted Nabokov-obsessed Meredith enjoyed some baby Russophile validation), but honestly, that's like saying, "I find myself wishing that I ate more dark leafy greens, to reconnect to the bodily satisfaction of absorbing vitamins!" When I'm plowing through DCPL, though, it's all, "Bring on the memoir! Bring on the giggles! Hide my kale in a fruitbomb smoothie!" ...I could definitely taste the vitamins in The Possessed (I swam, glassy-eyed, through the Samarkand section), but I slurped it all up happily anyhow.
You know, I find myself sometimes wishing that I read more literary analysis, needing somehow to dissect rather than consume (and, tbh, high-school minted Nabokov-obsessed Meredith enjoyed some baby Russophile validation), but honestly, that's like saying, "I find myself wishing that I ate more dark leafy greens, to reconnect to the bodily satisfaction of absorbing vitamins!" When I'm plowing through DCPL, though, it's all, "Bring on the memoir! Bring on the giggles! Hide my kale in a fruitbomb smoothie!" ...I could definitely taste the vitamins in The Possessed (I swam, glassy-eyed, through the Samarkand section), but I slurped it all up happily anyhow.
x150151041's review against another edition
5.0
So is Demons really just a botched novel, an aggregation of mutilated drafts, lacking any unified meaning? It isn't. Graduate school taught me this. It taught me through both theory and practice.
flynxnguyen's review against another edition
3.0
I don't know if I ended up siding with the acedemics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
mercm's review against another edition
4.0
EB delivers precisely what she promises: the rich material of a literature student's research. Highlights included serial encounters between Great Russian Authors (Chekhov and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky and Turgenev). Her faults are meta: EB's writing slips into the same trite style she brilliantly skewers early on. But she remains unpretentious and engaging.
donyala's review against another edition
4.0
This book was so much fun. Having spent rather a great deal of time with academics in English Literature, it was fun to read about the corresponding ridiculousness in Russian literature. It made me want to go pick up Anna Karenina again and to finally tackle War and Peace.
quietdomino's review against another edition
2.0
Despite sometimes beautiful prose, an author clearly both fiercely intelligent and possessed of a wry wit, and a topic near and dear to my heart, I found this book frequently unbearable. That's perhaps more my fault than hers, though I maintain that the capacious love of literature the book purports to explore is hard to identify in an author so remarkably self-centered.