The Possessed - Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“The Possessed” is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the author, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place: “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love” bound up, indeed, with Russian."

from:  Dostoyevsky and Me / Liesl Schillinger:

Book Review - 'The Possessed - Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,' by Elif Batuman - Review - NYTimes.com