My Life and Thoughts

Ingenious readers!  I am delighted to announce to you the first ever My Life and Thoughts contest/ book giveaway.  I was inspired by the following devastating critique of The Possessed (sent via Twitter by a valued reader):

Come to think of it, considering Palo Alto’s proximity to Mountain View, Elif really missed the boat on the Google/Gogol puns.

Well, I’m not going to stand here and tell you people that bluefugate isn’t absolutely right, because she is.  In my defense, however, thinking of a good Google/ Gogol pun is not easy.  Either that, or I’m just exceptionally bad at it. I recently devoted a two-hour plane ride to this challenge (big thanks to all the Seattleites who made it out to the University Bookstore on Monday!), and you will get an idea of my success when I tell you that the most promising avenue, by far, involved the factorability of the googol by 0000, Gogol’s early penname.  Subsequently I fell asleep and dreamed that I was searching Petersburg for a nose and got 4.8 million hits.

Can you do better?  I think you can.  Please submit your Google/ Gogol puns by 11:59PM July 2, either in the comments section below, or by writing here.  Don’t forget to include your email.  The winner gets a choice of one of two wonderful prizes:

• A signed Australian edition of The Possessed

OR

• An unsigned (unless you want it signed by me or my intern) edition of Alexandra Popoff’s biography of Sophia Tolstoy, of which I somehow have 3 copies.  It looks great!

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Valued readers!  I am just back from a visit to our nation’s publishing capital, where I had a fabulous time representing Tolstoy at the Strand.  In one week I managed to see three rats, and also to purchase and lose two umbrellas.  Satisfying as these canonical New York experiences were, I’m still really happy to be back in San Francisco and reunited with my loyal intern, who has spent the past month crashing with my webmaster—I believe, mostly eating cold pizza and occasionally helping out with some coding.

I will be making a brief trip to Seattle next week.  If you happen to be in Seattle, or perhaps embedded in the floor of the Puget Sound, living the long, slow, decadent life with my new role model, the geoduck clam, I warmly encourage you and your friends to stop by the University Bookstore, where I will be reading this upcoming Monday.

I’m also happy to report that, as my poor body shuttles between SF and Seattle, my book is apparently having a great time in Sydney and Stockholm.  Thanks to Mike Wong for these beautiful pictures of The Possessed enjoying a view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (left), and then unwinding at high tea with Wong’s mother and great-aunt (right; the tea pictured is Russian Caravan blend).

A shout-out is also due to Nancy Miller who sent the following beautiful images from Stockholm, which show The Possessed teetering perilously between a municipal garbage can (left) and what looks like the Stockholm City Hall, where they hold the Nobel Prize banquets (right)… a poignant metaphor for the uncertain destiny of all literary production.

Dear readers!  I am just back from Tel Aviv, where I went to interview some important world literary-historical cats.  They are literally sitting on some invaluable manuscripts!  Neither they nor their caretakers (the daughters of Max Brod’s late secretary) have been especially forthcoming to the press.  But that didn’t stop me and my colleague Avi Steinberg from creepily lurking around their front yard for like an hour.

Because I am a professional and think of everything, I had an artificial mouse in my pocket, with which I was able to attract the attention of one of the archival interns:

Although this “opening gambit” of the mouse enjoyed a certain self-contained success, it failed to spark the lively debate I had been anticipating about the legal and cultural battle surrounding Kafka’s legacy. Rather, the intern seemed somehow unable to move beyond what one might call the pourparlers, so that really all I learned from our encounter was his position on artificial mice.  (pro)

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Cosmopolitan readers!  I am delighted to report that The Possessed hits bookstores in Australia today, or rather tomorrow, because it is already the future in Australia.  A big thanks to Text Publishing and all the koalas and kangaroos for their hard work!  (The Australian edition, like the third US print run, corrects some errata and includes some missing information from first two printings, viz. a reading list and a shout-out to all the heroic English translators, including Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky, who have done so much to bring Russian books to the people who read them.)  I’m also thrilled to be on board with the Melbourne Writers Festival this summer.  I have never been to Australia, but am told that Australian people call it Oz.

Speaking of Oz, I had a great time in Southern California last weekend.  More shout-outs are due to my dear former classmate Amelia Glaser of UCSD, as well as to the upstanding non-dentist Dennis Wills of D. G. Wills, for setting everything up in La Jolla.  Thanks also to David Scheinker, a strong Russian-speaking male graduate student, who not only carried a heavy box of books all around the UCSD campus, but also drove me to CVS for toothpaste while Amelia was stranded in London by the volcano.

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These are some of the literary works cited in The Possessed, in chronological order by author’s year of birth.

Mir Ali Shir Nevai (Alisher Navoi) (1441–1501). Layli and Majnun (1484); Farhod and Shirin (1484); The Seven Planets (1484); The Language of Birds (1498); The Judgment of Two Languages (1499).

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530). The Baburnama (ca. 1529).

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Don Quixote (1605, 1615).

William Cowper (1731–1800). The Task (1785). 

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842). Rome, Naples, and Florence (1826); The Red and the Black (1830); The Charterhouse of Parma (1836).

Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The House of Ice (1835).

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Eugene Onegin (1833); “The Queen of Spades” (1834); Journey to Arzrum (1835); The Bronze Horseman (1837).

Nikolai Gogol (1809–52). Dead Souls (1842); “The Overcoat” (1842).

Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891). Oblomov (1859).

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). The Idiot (1868–69); Demons (1872).

Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenina (1875–77); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); The Living Corpse (1900).

Henry James (1843–1916). The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Sherlock Holmes stories (1892–1927).

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). “The Black Monk” (1894); “Lady with Lapdog” (1899); Uncle Vanya (1899).

Thomas Mann (1875–1955). The Magic Mountain (1924).

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). “Just for joy, take from my palms” (1920); “When Psyche—life—descends to the shades” (1920).

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). “Homeward!” (1925); “At the Top of My Voice” (1930).

Isaac Babel (1894–1940). 1920 Diary; “How It Was Done in Odessa” (1923); Red Cavalry (1926); “In the Basement” (1931); “Guy de Maupassant” (1932).

Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938). Past Days (1922–25).

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986). “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940); “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952).

Daniil Kharms (1905–42). “Pushkin and Gogol” (1934).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). Cancer Ward (1968).

Valentin Pikul (1928–1990). Word and Deed (1975).