The Possessed

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Now, I have mixed feelings towards Batuman. Her scholarship is erudite and proper, no doubt. Her prose is fluid, lightly humourous and colourful, as much as a literary academic can be. However, what made this book a work difficult to trudge through for me was, to be crude, the uninteresting nature of her research and personality. I normally wouldn't include personality as a determining factor of an author's book but this book is largely based on her experiences while doing research on russian and russian lit and her travels in the old soviet republics so I believe I have the right to comment on her character. Apart from the last chapter that gave the name to the book, where she finally reveals a bit more sincerity of character, the rest of the text basically issues from a retentive narrator who is either really trying to conceal (both from herself and her readers) the depth of her emotions, or is actually a very boring person. However, in the last chapter we get a glimpse of Batuman's heart speaking, albeit still in the most reserved manner possible. Unfortunately her pastoral descriptions did not engage me, nor did her simplistic and superficial descriptions of her interaction with the characters of the worlds she encounters. It is as if she has taken up literary criticism not only as a scientific way of looking at literature but also as a framework that dictates her heart. Her relationships with people are cold, unassuming and marked with a distance that, to me, is just plainly immature coming from a graduate student of mixed origins
Her picture reminds me of my deceased brother so I still have a positive bias towards her but this book I hope is only a toddlers step in a future of truly genuine writing. On the other hand, there is no way I can take seriously the over-the-top praise on the back of the book. So, in general this book is not bad, though is dissapointing, given the rich content she has the opportunity to tap into.



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Garth Ennis' 303

303 by Garth Ennis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Being my all-time favorite writer in the graphic novel tradition after Alan Moore, Ennis is right in his element in this mini series. Ennis is well-known for his extreme, sarcastic and cynically witty style as displayed in books like Preacher, The Pro, The Boys etc. but to me, his true calling lies in war stories. The series Battlefields, the two volume War Stories and even the farcical Adventures of the Bollock Patrol demonstrate his strange and creepy fascination with war machinery, strategy, weaponry but without an obsessive, fascistic and militaristic point of view. In fact what makes Ennis' stories so poignant is the balance he is able to draw between the truly heroic (!) esssence of human battle as been practised for centuries in its various forms and paraphernalia along with the inescapable paradox that it creates, which is the cruelty that man exacts upon man. Ennis is fascinated by war (especially the two world wars) but no matter how much guts go flying around the panels and limbs are torn to pieces in multicolor, Ennis never leaves the reader without a deep sense of sadness about [the misery that man hands upon man / that deepens like a coastal shelf] all the while praising some indistinct innate glory that physical conflict between bodies carry with them. This is why Ennis is a good writer: he doesn't try to solve the paradoxes of human existence nor does he pretend to have any ambitious certainties in mind, he just marvels at them with a compassion that is cynical enough to be seriously down-to-earth - thus to be taken seriously....



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