Torpor

Description

'Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you.' It's Summer, 1991, the dawning of the New World Order; a post-MTV, pre-AOL generation. 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 intention of adopting a Romanian orphan. Sylvie is an ex-punk video artist locked in a loveless marriage with Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathes academia. There are only two things, Sylvie believes, 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 there impede them. Kraus harnesses her talent for observational sensitivity to hit back with the grit and trauma of real, human relationships.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Torpor, and two books of art and cultural criticism, all published by Semiotext(e). She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches writing at European Graduate School.

[Kraus's] use of tense and modality are exceptional ... the sense of anomie, of lethargy, of the noon day demon are palpable ... Kraus is capable of creating fascinating work. * Spectator * Praise for I Love Dick: 'I know there was a time before I read Chris Kraus's I Love Dick (in fact, that time was only five years ago), but it's hard to imagine; some works of art do this to you. They tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle (in this case, what the form of the novel can handle) that there is no way to re-create your mind before your encounter with them -- Sheila Heti Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page ... I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind. -- Rick Moody