![]() ![]() ![]() The title of his subsequent book, Demons, has also been rendered in English as The Possessed. Batuman is drawn to Dostoyevsky and his titles: Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot was serialized in 1868 and ’69. The Idiot is Batuman’s first novel, but it’s her second book her essay collection The Possessed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was published in 2010, the year she became a staff writer at the New Yorker. And when she got online in her room at Santa Maddalena, she found that the manuscript had been waiting for her in the cloud-a swarm of files, migrating from server to server, that finally became her first novel: The Idiot (due from Penguin Press in March). Batuman was planning to set the action of this book in 2010, but as she wrote, she kept remembering a manuscript she had worked on in California, in 20, which was set during her time in college in the 1990s. The book she had come to Italy to write was supposed to be her first novel, prospectively called The Two Lives. This last amenity turned out to be crucial for Batuman. In addition to time and the company of Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte Rezzori, who runs the place, writers at Santa Maddalena can avail themselves of chestnut groves, rosebushes, meals, several dogs, and Wi-Fi. The foundation is a rural estate turned refuge for writers, a species forever in need of more time. In the summer of 2015, Elif Batuman was at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, trying to write a book. ![]()
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