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1 CHRIS KRAUS, TORPOR (SEMIOTEXT[E], 2006) More intense than any of the recent literary attempts to portray Europe's dark, post-1989 narrative of traditionalism and neoconservatism, Torpor is probably the book to deal with the past's haunting of the political present. While telling the story of an artist's becoming a writer, the novel suggests that the desire for a social identity is, for some, still entwined with a fundamental understanding of the impossibility of one's ever really having a home--giving us the tiniest sense of hope.

