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.
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Kevin Killian
Twenty Questions for Chris Kraus
Reviewed in the United States on 7 February 2007Verified Purchase
