“In her mid-20s, Batuman, a Turkish-American, is a graduate student at Stanford. She’s something of a polyglot savant—knowing English and Turkish, she picks up Russian and Uzbek with ease. A fledgling scholar, she gives a paper at a Tolstoy conference in Russia and helps host one on Isaac Babel at home. Batuman portrays the comic absurdity of her “profession” and renders the scholar’s velvet cage with farcical insouciance.”
Thomas Larson reviews Elif Batuman’s The Possessed.
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