Torpor (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) [Paperback]

Chris Kraus (Author)

Book Description

Series: Semiotext(e) / Native Agents | Publication Date: February 3, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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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Review

"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

"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

"Chris, and her generation of feminist theoreticians, e.g., Avital Ronell, Jane Gallup, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, did much more to embody the possibilities that were made possible by May 1968 and the critical writing of Tel Quel, etc., than the men who staked out all the early positions before succumbing to tenure." Rick Moody

" Torpor is as good a Grand Tour love story as James or Wharton, as good a memoir of Upstate New York as Edmund Wilson or Frederick Exley, a brilliant study of a Holocaust survivor, a brilliant study of the moral character of philosophers, the art world, academia, ambition, real estate, sex, orphans, and the fall of Romania. Kraus is as fun a travel writer as Ian Fleming, with a touch of Travels With Charley, and she writes about the strangeness of the world in a clear American prose filled with emotion, but with no vapors of style and forced effect to hide behind. I"ve read all of her books. Chris Kraus is a great writer." Michael Tolkin , author of Among the Dead

"[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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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Semiotext(e); First Edition edition (February 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158435027X
• ISBN-13: 978-1584350279
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #602,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love her writing., March 21, 2006

By 

Duncan Hinds "DH" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Torpor (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)

There are some books that can't easily be talked about in company because to share an enthusiasm for the work is to confess one's... well, either sins or transgressions, or what.... There are some writers, and Chris Kraus is one of them, who can't be easily taught because you can't discuss her without talking honestly about yourself. Anyone can be clever about, oh... you know... the writers who are easy to talk about.

THIS IS A GREAT BOOK. The last page is devastating but you need to read the whole thing ahead of it.
Read her other books, too.
She'll probably not get the attention she deserves, because the critics will find ways to keep her local and small.
But you won't, will you?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Twenty Questions for Chris Kraus, February 7, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Torpor (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)

An American girl meets and marries a French boy who's carrying around an enormous number of paralyzing memories of the Holocaust, and she decides to adopt a baby from a Third World country.

If only I could ask Chris Kraus my 20 questions! Among them would be, How would you describe the form you work in? It's very distinctive, very Chris Kraus, but what is it? I've heard people refer to your books as "comic" books, not like Nancy and Sluggo but something more like a Jane Austen sense of social comedy.

Torpor conveys like very few novels the misery of a long term relationship. You compare them to "hypothermia, giving yourself up in free and loose embtace into a dream state that turns out to be inertia." Do all relationships disintegrate into clownishness? You cite the comic French pairs, Mercier and Camier, Bouvard and Pechuchet, as models for your nagging lovers.

What's also so striking about your book is that you're not afraid to make a dog one of your main characters. I don't think any reader will forget the heroic dachshund Lily who gets carted around Europe in a sort of hideaway sack, nor that it's Lily's suffering that Sylvie and Jerome overlook in their picaresque adventure.

Sylvie is afraid that no one will ever take her seriously because she is untrained and has no MFA. And Jerome, who is a full professor at an Ivy League university, is always taunting her about this. Ms. Kraus, I read your book of essays, VIDEO GREEN, and the title essay is pretty much about the same thing, only translated to the art world. Galleries are everything, and there is no entry into getting a gallery unless you have an MFA from a select school. The whole system seems hopeless.

Back to Torpor, we of the New Narrative movement want to claim you as one of our own for your amazing vulnerability and the frankness with which you paint Sylvie as basically a sort of loser doomed to fail at anything she takes up.

And the gossip level is fairly astounding. We feel like we're backstage with Nan Goldin, Felix Guattari, Kathy Acker, so many more from the worlds of high art, French theory, transgressive literature. Of course, Ms. Kraus, everyone wants to know the identity of the few you have concealed in pseudonyms, especially "the writers Kenneth Broomfield and June Goodman."

Sylvie can't even look at Kenneth Broomfield or even think about him without one unfortunate comment, which he may or may not have made, ringing in her head. We've all been there, haven't we.

If you were here, I would ask you, do you write for a "particularly cultured audience?" And you would probably say something like, no, I write for a curious one, I want my books to be read by a girl just starting community college,

The problem with Europe, and Jerome by extension, is that people can't separate the present from the past of fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago. As Jerome is haunted and motivated by the events of his childhood, the Romanians seem to be trapped in a nightmare medievalism. In one city Jerome and Sylvie try to stay at, Brigitte Bardot appears to applaud the citizens who have let 300,000 wild dogs run feral in the streets. Meanwhile, in LA, there's no past and there's no imperfection and everything is beautiful.

Kraus writes beautifully about sex, and there's a strong passage where Sylvie is transported back to earlier ages when she's experiencing orgasm, back to 17, 14, once to age 5. It's very moving.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to ask these questions of the writer, but I can recommend TORPOR to anyone interested in either happiness or despair, America or Europe, the new or the old.

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerfully rich and potent--Inspired writing- A FABULOUS WORK!, December 16, 2006

By 

Jill L. Poyourow (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Torpor (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)

I immensely enjoyed taking this journey with Chris Kraus' heroine Sylvie, savoring every description and nugget of pathos. I began to feel a deep affection for her as the story unfolded. This work has broad appeal given the author's own background; a fascinating mélange centered around art, philosophy and the past. This background has provided the author with ingredients for a truly engaging and spectacular point of view about the time, places and subjects on which she bases her story. The writing has the flavor of a deeply satisfying stew, cooked to perfection. I was moved by Sylvie's appreciation of the beauty of the ordinary as she confronted the painful experiences in her life, described as only Chris Kraus can do.

"torpor" is a beautifully written novel by a brilliant author with a fresh and authentic voice. Both Kraus' style and subject matter will appeal to a wide audience. Not enough women are familiar with Chris Kraus' writing - hopefully "torpor" will change that. However, Kraus is not specifically a women's writer: the male audience will be just as spellbound. We are very fortunate for her gifts, and for "torpor".