Torpor

Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you. If you could create a golden kind of time and lay it right beside the other time, the time of horror, Bad History could just recede into the distance without ever having to be resolved.--from TorporSet at the dawn of the New World Order, Chris Kraus's third novel, Torpor loops back to the beginning of the decade that was the basis of I Love Dick, her pseudo-confessional cult-classic debut. It's summer, 1991, post-MTV, pre-AOL. Jerome Shafir 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 a Romanian orphan. Nirvana's on the radio everywhere, and wars are erupting across Yugoslavia.Unhappily married to Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathes academe, Sylvie thinks only of happiness. At 35, she dreams of stuffed bears and wonders why their lives 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 success of The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as they move forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them.Savagely ironic and deeply lyrical, Torpor explores the swirling mix of nationalisms, capital flows and negative entropy that define the present, haunted by the persistence of historical memory. Written in the third person, it is her most personal novel to date.

ISBN 158435027X   Pages 296 ISBN13 9781584350279 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Semiotext (E)   Weight (grammes) 431 Imprint Semiotext (E)   Published in New York Format Paperback   Series title Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Publication date 10 Mar 2006   Height (mm) 229 Library of Congress PS   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 813.54   Spine width (mm) 19 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

"Chris Kraus combines fiction, autobiography and criticism in ways that are as funny and provocative as her titles ( Aliens and Anorexia, for example)." Los Angeles Times Book Review "[The narrative is] so startling that it resuscitates words long fallen out of fashion: Torpor is honest and true." Alex Kitnick The Believer " Torpor concerns itself with a feminist filmmaker consumed and confounded by the intellect and desire of a rapacious philosopher-lover. It"s personalized and smart with open thought and independent energy." Vanity Fair " Torpor is a brilliant, funny, and moving novel about the failure of a marriage and the moral vacuum created by the global "success" of contemporary American culture." Rain Taxi "A very cool surprise." Thurston Moore Arthur "Chris Kraus believes in 'subliminal cross-referencing' of times and cultures and describes it in a lively and highly entertaining language free of unnecessary academic musings. Somewhat like that great art historian and sociologist Arnold Hausser, the author believes in the spirit of her own age but is able to treat it with 'grace' that is refracted through the multicontoured mirror of all other preceding eras." Nina Zivancevic American Book Review "Dazzling... [A] hilarious and biting satire of academia and the art world." Leslie Camhi Nextbook "Kraus is an underrated thinker and critic; her books form a compelling record of recent art and culture, and make substantial contributions to both." Publishers Weekly Kraus's occasionally terse style, her use of time and place and lexicon and architecture and cultural mood in place of communications or feelings is a new language. A non-emotional language for emotions. I want to tell her thank you, and mazel tov. Lisa Carver The Globe and Mail

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