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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
The true but unlikely stories of lives devoted - absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully! - to the Russian classics
No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.
Batuman's subsequent pieces - for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books - have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence - including her own.
Jacket Illustration © 2017 Roz Chast
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Street Without a Name
- Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
- By: Kapka Kassabova
- Narrated by: Emily Gray
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and grew up under the drab, muddy, gray mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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Good start, but ended up not liking the author
- By Giselle on 11-02-21
By: Kapka Kassabova
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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The Lost
- A Search for Six of Six Million
- By: Daniel Mendelsohn
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates.
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Exquisite Narration, Breathtakingly Heartfelt Book
- By Gillian on 08-14-16
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Create Dangerously
- The Immigrant Artist at Work
- By: Edwidge Danticat
- Narrated by: Kristin Kalbli
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.
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A very important book.
- By Tyler on 12-07-19
By: Edwidge Danticat
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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What listeners say about The Possessed
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Donald Bullard
- 02-17-23
Brilliant
Magic. The story engages anyone interested in the puzzle of Russian literature. I wanted to stop listening to savour it, but couldn't. I kept wanting a lag. The story played on. I thought Uzbekistan would be a wasteland. My mistake. Every note original, and well played.
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- Christine
- 01-14-23
Very enjoyable
Very enjoyable if you like language. Beautifully narrated by the author, who showed her knowledge in literature and history.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Edward Forsythe
- 01-21-20
Chasing Tolstoy and Other Russian Authors
Batuman's story of following her interests in Russian authors was interesting and mostly engaging, but I think it would have been better if I had read more of the books she discussed beforehand--especially Tolstoj and Pushkin. The narration was good and the information about her experiences living in former Soviet satellite countries was extremely interesting! It was worth listening to this book for that insight alone. Anyone interested in Russian literature or in life in Russia / former Soviet countries shortly after the fall of the USSR will find this book engaging and enjoyable.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rachael Goins
- 12-28-23
Captivating and original
She’s a great writer and I haven’t read anything like this before. It’s funny and strange. At times, she jumps so quickly from obscure figure to obscure figure that I can lose the thread but overall I really enjoyed hearing her thoughts about literature and life.
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- Super Ryan
- 05-07-24
Absolutely Possessed!!!
This book was a phenomenal romp through obsession of the best kind. To be immersed in the authors passion feels like a tidal wave taking me to a new frontier. I know own Anna Karenina thanks to Elif and this book. 🤞
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- Jay Quintana
- 10-23-17
A Memoir of the Writer's Graduate Student Days
In a nutshell, this book is too much about the author and too little about Russian books. Though she travels to exotic locales -- Hungary, Samarkand -- the author's life is just not that interesting. The parts about the Russian books are good, but there's too much extraneous stuff between them.
With editing, this would have made a great New Yorker article. Then again, perhaps that was its original incarnation and someone made the ill-fated decision to expand it into a book. I'm too uninterested to care. I'm done with this book.
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3 people found this helpful
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- MAJ_lawyer
- 09-18-18
Good book;Ironically, bad narration(by the author)
The "Samarkand" sections are wry, witty, and insightful. The author would do well to find someone else to narrate. I was reading the paper book as well as listening when I couldn't read. All of the humor I found when I read was flattened when I heard her reading it, in her melancholic monotone.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 08-29-17
Dear Russian Literary Diary...
I first became aware of Elif Batuman's book almost seven years ago when I saw it suddenly appear (mistakenly?) next to Tolstoy on the Fiction shelf at B&N. A few years later at another bookstore I saw it shelved next to Dostoevsky. At first I was a bit irritated. I figured it was a bit of shelving incompetence. What kind of people were these bookstores hiring these days? Later, however, I softened. I actually began to feel this was a form of NINJA (Sambo?) marketing. Perhaps, it wasn't accidentally placed there. Who actually peruses Literary Criticism/Literary Memoir sections these days? Perhaps, the placement in the Fiction section next to BIG Russian authors wasn't a mistake after all. It actually jammed the book into my craw; dropped it into my radar.
How to describe the book? It isn't exactly a memoir and isn't exactly literary criticism. It reads like a hyper-caffeinated, precocious literary/travel diary for an introspective writer/academic fascinated by the granular context surrounding Russian novels. Batuman isn't just interested in the text. She wants to shoot Chekhov's gun and lay on some train tracks in St. Petersburg. She wants the genealogy and the genetic profile of these novels and stories. Toward the end of her academic career (and her book) it isn't just fetish items and places she is obsessed with. She isn't just finding the context and the clues surrounding Russian novels, the novels have become part of her life. Her last essays seem to reflect the power of Russian novels to invade the cold spaces in our brain, break the chains of reality, bleed into our relationships, our dreams, our motives.
For the most part, I dug this book. The center essays were a bit uneven, however. So, I can't claim this is close to a perfect book. But it is unique, fascinating, and well-written. Batuman has a way with prose. As a 6 foot tall, Turkish woman, her perspective on everything is biologically unique, but it is her talent at writing that makes this book, this precocious journal, this love story to Russian lit worth the time and cost.
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13 people found this helpful