Torpor (Native Agents) - Softcover

Kraus, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158435027X ISBN 13: 9781584350279

Publisher: Semiotext, 2006

Synopsis

Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Timewas a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay itright beside the other time, the time of horror, Bad History could just recede into the distancewithout ever having to be resolved.--from TorporSet at the dawn of the New World Order, ChrisKraus's third novel, Torpor loops back to the beginning of the decade that was the basis of I LoveDick, her pseudo-confessional cult-classic debut. It's summer, 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL. JeromeShafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment,set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the specious aim of adopting aRomanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere, and wars are erupting acrossYugoslavia.Unhappily married to Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathesacademe, Sylvie thinks only of happiness. At 35, she dreams of stuffed bears and wonders why theirlives lack the tremulous sincerity that pervades thirtysomething, that season's hot new TV show.There are only two things, Sylvie thinks, that will save them: a child of their own, and the successof The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as theymove forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination atAuschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them.Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torporexplores the swirling mix of nationalisms, capital flows and negative entropy that define thepresent, haunted by the persistence of historical memory. Written in the third person, it is hermost personal novel to date.

About this title

About the Author

Jon F. Merz is Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Reviews

While it's being billed as a novel—almost certainly for legal reasons—this is actually the third installment in Kraus's series of memoirs, begun momentously with I Love Dick (1997) and followed up in Aliens and Anorexia (2000). Kraus's estranged husband, Sylvère Lotringer, is a Columbia French professor and the founder, with Kraus, of Semiotext(e): he figures prominently in all three books; here, the two are named Sylvie Green and Jerome Shafir, respectively. Kraus's third-person narrative seems coy compared with the too-close-for-comfort first-person of the two previous books, but her opening tales of Sylvie's desire for a child and of Jerome's initial unwillingness to parent with her (she has two abortions at his behest) are wrenching. Eventually, in 1991, the two haplessly take a trip to Romania to adopt an orphan. The trip is the book's center, and Sylvie fugues around it brilliantly, ruminating on art and the art world, sex and sexism, marriage and children, Judaism and the Holocaust, urbanism and ruralism—as all relate to her life as a perennial outsider. Kraus, whose writing about the L.A. art scene was collected as Video Green (2004), is an underrated thinker and critic; her books form a compelling record of recent art and culture, and make substantial contribution to both. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Semiotext
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158435027X
• ISBN 13: 9781584350279
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 285