Torpor
by Chris Kraus
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In 1991, unhappily married Sylvie and her husband set off on a journey across Eastern Europe in search of a Romanian orphan to adopt. 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 Torpor Set at the dawn of the New show more 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. 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 is Kraus's most personal novel to date. show lessTags
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An easier book to assimilate than [b:I Love Dick|243991|I Love Dick|Chris Kraus|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1289697846s/243991.jpg|912458], with an ending justifying the complete reading of this novel thus lessoning the pain of my manifesting time lost, never to be regained. Why a person would wish to end his life this way is beyond my understanding. Nonetheless I continue to practice this disagreeable discipline. Suffice to say there is nothing remarkable to report regarding this novel. Names could be dropped, but Kraus already has this operation down in spades. A little pillow talk might be fun, but my too brief and untidy accounting would be a shame to suffer through, just as hers was.
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ThingScore 100
Based on real events and people, laced with art-world arcana and academic quarrelling, there’s a certain pleasure in descrambling the names here, figuring out who didn’t like whose Bataille book and who blew coke with Burroughs. The real gratification, however, is in the wrenching blood and guts that mix with the gossipy bits. Crappy feelings about messed-up relationships cut back and show more forth with painful proddings of historical events, all rendered in a kind of open prose that allows a dirt road to lead to Desert Storm and wind up in an analysis of thirtysomething without wandering astray. show less
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Bull Tongue
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Author Information
16+ Works 1,932 Members
Chris Kraus is the author of the bestselling I Love Dick, as well as Aliens Anorexia, Torpor, Summer of Hate, and three books of cultural criticism. She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches writing at the European Graduate School. Kraus is a coeditor of Semiotext(e) and lives in Los Angeles.
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- Canonical title
- Torpor
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- 125
- Popularity
- 261,114
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.17)
- Languages
- English, German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
