By the end of this refreshingly modern take on literature, Batuman feels like a friend, and her essays like the remarkably...
In her debut, New Yorker contributor and n+1 fan favorite Batuman turns lit-crit on its head with a cheeky, guided tour through her own literary scholarship.
The academy wasn’t always the author’s life calling; rather, the “six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman” dreamed of writing her novels. But fate—and her mother’s copy of Anna Karenina—intervened, leading to a series of adventures delving deep into Babel, Tolstoy, Chekhov and other such notables. Part travelogue, part anthropological study and part meditation on literature, her essays take readers into the strange corners of her academic journey, including the ice palaces of St. Petersburg, the streets of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where bakeries are signified by a flat loaf of bread literally nailed to the doors, and a literary convention in suburban California. Fans of popular Russian writers will delight in the Tolstoy chapter, in which Batuman finds herself at a convention of scholars, investigating a possible murder on the grounds of Tolstoy’s ancestral home. The chapter evolves like a real-life, esoteric version of the board game Clue. The author’s dissection of a Stanford Babel convention—her first essay ever published—is biting and thoroughly entertaining. The longest and most engrossing chapters focus on her bizarre foray into Central Asia, where she seeks a link between her Turkish heritage and the Russian literature she has come to adore, deeply testing the bonds of a romantic relationship along the way. The essays are arranged almost haphazardly, with the Samarkand summer broken into three parts interspersed with other essays, but that only adds to the book’s quirky charm.
By the end of this refreshingly modern take on literature, Batuman feels like a friend, and her essays like the remarkably well-constructed, analytical, eye-opening e-mails you always wanted that friend to send.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-53218-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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