MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

In honor of New Year’s and its resolutions, and also in honor of flu season, I’d like to share with you an inspirational/ berating extract from the Discourses and Selected Writings of Epictetus, who is truly the Vince Lombardi of Hellenistic philosophy.

From Discourse 16 (”On Providence”)

…You eagerly travel to Olympia to see the work of Phidias, and all of you account it a shame to die never having seen the sight. [24] But when there is no need even to travel, when you are already there because Zeus is present everywhere in his works, don’t you want to look at and try to understand them? [25] Will you never come to a realization of who you are, what you have been born for and the purpose for which the gift of vision was made in our case?

[26] ‘But difficult and disagreeable things happen in life.’ Well, aren’t difficulties found at Olympia? Don’t you get hot? And crowded? Isn’t bathing a problem? Don’t you get soaked through in your seats when it rains? Don’t you finally get sick of the noise, the shouting and the other irritations? [27] I can only suppose that you weigh all those negatives against the worth of the show, and choose, in the end, to be patient and put up with it all. [28] Furthermore, you have inner strengths that enable you to bear up with difficulties of every kind. You have been given fortitude, courage and patience. [29] Why should I worry about what happens if I am armed with the virtue of fortitude? Nothing can trouble or upset me, or even seem annoying. Instead of meeting misfortune with groans and tears, I will call upon the faculty especially provided to deal with it.

[30] ‘But my nose is running!’ What do you have hands for, idiot, if not to wipe it? [31] ‘But how is it right that there be running noses in the first place?’ [32] Instead of thinking up protests, wouldn’t it be easier just to wipe your nose?

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Master of the art of happiness

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Happy 2012 to my equanimous readers!

Earlier this month, I was very happy to spend two days at the Frankfurt Book Fair, promoting the German edition of my book and impressing the German media with my air of misery and depression. I am told that the following headline, from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Feuilleton, alludes to the terrible time I was having (full text up here):

The photo caption, according to Google Translate: “Elif Batuman, just before the bad mood was.”

I do remember being puzzled by that interview, since the interviewer didn’t actually ask any questions; he mostly just wanted to discuss his theory that the attendees of the Frankfurt Book Fair are possessed by literature. Historically, of course, it is a very thin line separating the possessed from the grouchy.

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Germanophilic readers! I’m really happy to share with you the cover designs for the German (Swiss) and Swedish editions of The Possessed.

Die Besessenen comes out this fall with the super-cool Kein & Aber. I love the image of some chick prostrated, clearly by the power of literature, on a green grass-like background:

I believe this is a visual allusion to the story of my first-ever magazine photo shoot:

I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant… opined that the pictures were coming out “too sultry”. She said I was showing “too much neck”. Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn’t been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn’t have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. “Look like you’re reading,” the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to “The Gypsies”: “There is no defence against fate.”

(You can see the resulting photo on this page – scroll down, or just do a text search for “CAN’T SAY NYET.”)

There is no defense against fate, but against sultriness of the neck, that girl is protected by her upraised arm – just another example of the inimitable Swiss touch of class.

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Satiated readers!  Please join me in getting excited again about The Possessed, in honor of next week’s UK launch! Conveniently, the book now looks completely different. I thought I would never like any cover as much as Roz Chast’s FSG paperback - but check out the new Granta hardcover, designed byMichael Salu:

I love the original paperback, because it’s so scary and cheap, two of my favorite qualities.  But I also love the new hardcover, because it’s so trippy and classy, two more of my favorite qualities.

The new cover illustration is based on the dream sequence in “Who Killed Tolstoy?”:

I dreamed I was playing tennis against Tolstoy. As Alice in Wonderland plays croquet with a flamingo for a mallet, I was playing tennis with a goose for a racket. Lev Nikolayevich had a normal racket. I served the ball, producing a flurry of fluffy gray down. Tolstoy’s mighty backhand projected the ball far beyond the outermost limits of the tennis lawn, into the infinite dimension of total knowledge and human understanding. Match point.

It is, as Salu explains, “a dual cover, with either Elif or Tolstoy winning the rally depending on how the book is held”:

February: is it me or does it seem to roll around once every 9 months these days.  I’m just back from the Writers Unlimited festival in the Hague, where I was promoting the Dutch edition of my book.  It looks very different from the US edition.

There was a wonderful photographer who took all these wonderful photographs that subsequently appeared on a bulletin board, so I took some photographs of the bulletin board.  This one is my favorite because there’s just so much going on:

Pictured, from left to right, are Abdelkader Benali, Elif Batuman, Maaza Mengiste, and David Van Reybrouck, floating over a giant hamburger.  We were discussing the internationalization of literature (in response to a super-smart lecture by Tim Parks).

I had been deposited at the theater directly from the Amsterdam airport, with only time to change my shoes.  This was all a wonderful surprise since I had misread the schedule and somehow thought the discussion wasn’t until the following morning.  But as you can see from the picture, I was playing it really cool.

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