MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

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”:

A quick response to this fascinating item of trivia re: Tolstoy and the RNC (thank you, Chad!):

…This really has nothing to do with Turkish women/tea glasses, but I was wondering if you had heard about Michael Steele’s response when asked what is his favorite book at the RNC chair debate. He said “War and Peace” but then added, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Somehow everything I ever hear about Michael Steele brings back to me the pathos of the human condition, I guess largely through Jon Stewart’s image of him as the Muppet who always has a fly in his soup – actually a kind of Tolstoy-like detail, when you think about it.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!”

[Note to self: could the entire dissatisfied-Muppet/ Grover relationship be based on the tense interchange between Oblonsky and the Tatar waiter (AK I, 10)?]

Mostly though I feel like this is a valuable object lesson to all of us in not trying to spontaneously produce the first sentence of WP on national television, because let’s be honest,  it’s a great book and everything, but Tolstoy didn’t exactly bust out his catchiest lines on the opening:

“Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des country estates, de la famille Buonaparte.”

Or, for those who prefer the original Russian:

“Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte.”

In the attempt to fathom Turkish sports fan culture, I spent this past Sunday at not one but two Istanbul soccer games. I started at Beşiktaş, whose fan organization is renowned for its high levels of political committedness and general enthusiasm.

“You’re going to hear all kinds of curse words,” the taxi driver told me, on the way to the game. “You’re going to hear unheard-of things that nobody should ever hear.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m trying to advance my knowledge of the Turkish language.”

“If you’re trying to advance your knowledge of the Turkish language, I’m not sure a Beşiktaş match is the first place I would advise you to go. It seems to me there are other, better places to advance your knowledge of the Turkish language. But of course, you know best,” he said. We drove a while in silence. “Here’s what I really want to know,” the driver resumed. “What are you going to write in your story? That the Beşiktaş fans are spewing curses unfit for the ears of civilized people? Or that Inönü Stadium is united by a warm, intimate, unpretentious atmosphere?”

“Well, whatever I see, that’s what I’ll write,” I said.

“You’re going to write what you see?” The driver looked really depressed. “Well, then we’re done for.”

I’m told there were between 40,000 and 42,000 football fans that day in the stadium, which has a 38,000 capacity. I had bought a ticket in the cheapest section and literally every seat had someone standing on top of it and directly in front of it. Getting into the stands was no joke. The low point for me was when some particularly solid-looking dudes in leather jackets shouldered me out of the crowd and it looked like I wasn’t going to make it into the gate.  But just then a magical gust of wind blew off my hood, and one of the solid dudes exclaimed: “There’s a lady here! Back off, man, let the lady through.” Everyone standing near me stepped aside and let me through! Say what you will about Beşiktaş fans, they know how to treat a girl (sort of).

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Hi Elif,
to my delight I stumbled across a copy of The Possessed at a bookshop last night in Sydney and purchased it. A slight mystery is that it has an inscription in it: “To Okan Orhan, Gok memnan oldum!”. I don’t want to cast aspersions on Okan, but it was intriguing how it wound up in the new books and what the inscription meant.
thanks
Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Thank you for your kind message, and for your purchase of The Possessed!

Re: Okan Orhan, it’s a funny story.  I did an event at Gleebooks in Sydney a few weeks ago (in conversation with the lovely Jane Gleeson-White, who—another funny story—turns out to be the author of a forthcoming book about double-entry bookkeeping, in which capacity she is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who has ever quoted from my unpublished dissertation on double-entry bookkeeping and the novel!  The organizers didn’t know about this connection when they set up the event.)

At the book signing afterwards, a bearded, slightly distracted-looking young man in a leather jacket introduced himself and, speaking in Turkish, told me that he grew up in Istanbul and that he used to be roommates with the critic Walter Pater.  I was very tired, since I had spent the morning at ABC studios in Melbourne, doing a radio show with the amazing David Astle, “Sergeant Pepper of cryptic crosswords,” after which my incredibly heroic Australian publicist and I headed to the airport to catch a plane to Sydney.  The flight departed not only with a delay but also from the international terminal, which meant that on the way out we had to go through customs and passport control, whence we rushed to the hotel and immediately to the bookstore, the reason I bring all this up is being that I might well have misunderstood the exact nature of the relationship between Okan Orhan (for it was he) to Walter Pater, because Walter Pater died in 1894.

Okan Orhan then asked me to inscribe a copy of The Possessed to him, which I did. “Çok memnun oldum” means “I’m very happy [to have met you].”

At that point I really had to get something to eat, because two hours later I had to be at the Sydney ABC (where I was a guest on Late Night Live, right after an expert on the Australian elections, and also another expert on cyber-terrorism).  Whereas O.O. was trying, quietly but persistently, to tell me the story of his life.  It was probably an interesting story but I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.  The whole thing ended with the organizer gently but firmly inviting him to leave.  I then lost track of his strand of the story—forever… or so I thought.

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An ordinary guy, ordinary in every way, except one… he is susceptible to catnip.  Is it a blessing or a curse?  Did God make him that way, or was he conditioned by his time?  Who is in the right—him or society? Dear readers, I really have a feeling about this one.  It might just be my foothold to the B-minus list…

more soon…