BIOGRAPHY
She was born in 1977 to Turkish parents in New York and grew up in New Jersey. She currently lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco. Batuman earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University, California.
In the international academic system, Ph.D. (Doctor of
Philosophy) corresponds to a research doctorate. It is the highest degree of
education obtainable. Despite its name, it is not limited to philosophy, but
encompasses almost all disciplines and certifies the ability to conduct
original research and produce new knowledge.
Her debut book, the 2010 memoir The Possessed: Adventures with
Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection of essays drawn
from her graduate studies, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
Since 2010, Batuman has served as staff writer for The New Yorker, producing reported pieces and essays on topics ranging from
ancient philosophy and insect behaviour to Turkish society and literary
history.
Her honours include the Whiting Writers’ Award, the
Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize
for Humour, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018.
She is a professor of literature at Stanford
University. Her articles in publications such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s and The Guardian have made her one of the most admired and sought-after
authors of her generation.
The Possessed (Los poseídos.
Seix Barral, 2011), her first book, was published in more than ten countries.
SUMMARY
Elif Batuman is an author known for bending the
boundaries between subject and author. In this story, she picks up Kafka’s
irresistible gauntlet and mixes her voice with his. Each of Batuman’s books
engages the ghost of a literary master: her essay collection The Possessed
and her novel The Idiot, both borrow their titles from Dostoyevsky; her
second novel Either/Or takes its title from Kierkegaard. Literature, for
her, is a school of life, a continuous study of ontological limits and the
discursive regimes by which humans disappoint one another. In The Board
─a brief, openly Kafkaesque story, published to commemorate the centenary of
Franz Kafka’s death― the reader is implicated in the philosophical questions
posed by the text. Batuman conjures an imaginary landscape that gives her the
power to play with the fantastical, a fine pastiche that echoes the bizarre
oppressiveness of Kafka’s fictional institutions, the helplessness of so many
of his protagonists, and a Kafkian atmosphere that tends to linger an inch away
from surrealism.
Needing to stay in the city, the protagonist of The
Board has made an appointment with a broker to buy an apartment. When she
arrives, she only sees a bush planted in the middle of the sidewalk which turns
out to be the broker. They enter the building dodging a homeless man who asks
her for help, but the broker rushes her to meet the seller. She needs the
apartment and doesn’t want to antagonize the broker. They enter the building,
climb the stairs to the fourth floor, and open the door to an apartment. She
notices the luxurious details, but the broker quickly moves through the rooms
until he reaches a linen closet that he empties to discover an air duct in the
dark. They enter and see an iron staircase leading into the darkness. They go
down further than they came up, until they reach what appears to be a moderately
sized studio. Although it has no windows, she still thinks it’s worth it. In
one corner there is a dog bed with an elegant cashmere blanket. She remembers
the poodle from her childhood and feels good omens. But there’s no dog, it’s
the seller in his bed. She tries not to show surprise and hides her discomfort.
“I love your apartment, it’s just what I’m looking for”, she tells him. The two
men talk to each other and then they ask her if she’s a serious buyer. She
answers yes. “Then the board will consider your application”, the broker says.
Immediately, a corridor that leads directly to the assembled board members is revealed. Here begins a hellish interrogation that
lasts several hours. Without detecting any sign of friendliness on the faces of
those gathered, the protagonist strives to respond appropriately. Until, in the
end, she realizes that the board will not give her access to the purchase of
the apartment, and she takes the way back. Here the author creates an open
ending by leaving her hanging on the stairs studying what her next move will
be.
The characters in The Board remain unnamed,
vague, indistinguishable. The speaker is the woman looking for a place to live.
The broker showing her the apartment is mistaken for a shrub. A heap of dirty
carpets discloses a homeless man. The seller is an old man resembling a
cashmere blanket elegantly tossed on a dog bed. In this wobbling world, unnamed
characters morph from “heaps” to humans and no one is sure of what they see.
Phrasing like “it was possible that” calls to mind the interior monologue of
Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, trying to understand how he became a cockroach. Part of
Batuman’s brilliance lies in her capacity to contemporize the distancing syntax
that Kafka employed to estrange humans from their own claims and statements of
fact. In the story the unjust offenses are constructed by legalese that propels
events towards their formal conclusion. But the conclusion disrupts the
possibility of closure.
Three reflections
-Physical inaccessibility as a reflection of social
barriers. Throughout the story, the protagonist tries to convince an absurd
board to let her live in an almost inaccessible basement apartment. The final
image connects this impossible architectural barrier with the invisible
barriers of wealth, privilege, and belonging to a specific social class.
-The criminalization of subjectivity. Just like
in Kafka’s The Trial, legal language and bureaucratic demands end
up turning the protagonist’s simple existence into a sort of crime. The closing
image underscores how the formal discourse of institutions has the power to
judge and strip the individual of dignity.
-An ending without traditional closure. Instead
of resolving whether or not the protagonist gets the basement, Batuman chooses
an open ending that breaks away from traditional logic. The fantastic and
absurd landscape at the end serves as a visual superstructure to make an
abstract feeling understandable: The total helplessness of the contemporary
human being in the face of collective rules they cannot control.
The final metaphor of The Board functions as a
perfect visual and conceptual image of the clash between bureaucratic
absurdity, social inaccessibility, and class structures. In short, we are faced
with an enigmatic work, brilliantly written by a young author who shows us how
modern systems dehumanize the individual.
QUESTIONS
-Think about an absord situation in which you’ve been involved and tell us about it.
-What do you think it is best for the individual / community: rent a flat or buy a flat? Give your reasons.
-Bureaucracy: is it necessary? According to you, how could a society lessen the amount of bureaucracy? Give some ideas!
VOCABULARY
ailing, wherewithal, stroller, reclaimed, vanity, smarting, loafers, Murphy bed, plush dog, poodle, tyre-kicker, batik, engrossment, gaunt, round-the-clock, weathered
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