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Summary
Summary
O, The Oprah Magazine's 20 Best Titles of the Year
Time Magazine's 100 Books to Read in 2020
Financial Times' Best Books of 2020
Esquire's Best Books of 2020
New York Times Editors' Choice
Lit Hub's Best Books of 2020
Bustle's Best Short Story Collections of 2020
Electric Literature's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020
Library Journal's Best Short Stories of 2020
"Superb. . . . Krauss's depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers." --Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review
"From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction." --Esquire
In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.
Author Notes
Nicole Krauss is an international best selling author.
The History of Love (W.W. Norton 2005) won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, France's Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger, was named #1 book of the year by Amazon.com, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes.
Nicole's first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best writers under 40. Her most recent novel is GREAT HOUSE (W.W. Norton October 2010). Nicole's books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.
Krauss recently completed a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This triumphant first collection from Krauss (Forest Dark) crisscrosses the globe in 10 ambitious stories written over two decades that wrestle with sexuality, desire, and human connection. In one of the greatest stories, "Seeing Ershadi," a dancer believes she spies the star of the Iranian film Taste of Cherry while in Japan for a performance, and believes she must save the actor from the suicide he commits in the film. After a friend tells her of her own unique encounter with the actor years earlier, the dancer faces the depth of her fanatic and obsessive state. Another highlight, "Future Emergencies," is set shortly after 9/11 and remains timely as its female protagonist navigates a New York City where gas masks are distributed for free and local governments warn of vague threats. "I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake," another standout, concerns a woman visiting her dead father's apartment in Tel Aviv, only to find a stranger living in a back room, and the collection's title story breaks a woman's interactions with several men into four parts to ruminate on gender norms and expectations. Krauss's style is marked by a willingness to digress into seemingly superfluous details, yet the minutiae helps the author conjure a series of realistic environments, allowing each story feel lived in. This is a spectacular book. (Nov.)
Booklist Review
What defines a life well-lived? What does it take for a chance encounter that turns into a friendship developed over the course of one summer to make its presence felt decades on? Krauss (Forest Dark, 2017) winningly explores these and other weighty issues in a home run of a short story collection. The characters frequently struggle under the burden of familial guilt compounded by geography. In "The Husband," a U.S.-based psychiatrist confronts her feelings of hopelessness and jealousy as her aged mother finds new love in Israel. In "I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake," a daughter makes peace with her father's death and peeks into a vision of his life beyond one that she had made room for. Jewish themes flow through many stories, most strikingly in "In the Garden," where a horticulture apprentice finds out that "Latin America's greatest landscape architect" was a Nazi agent. Above all, these stories pay homage to strong women. As female characters mature, they find resilience in the power they wield despite societal constraints. Like the narrator in "Seeing Ershadi," all of Krauss' women characters women eventually realize that their triumphs are due to "strengths we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths."
Guardian Review
In a conversation about her short story "To Be a Man", the American writer Nicole Krauss was asked about the "thin line" that marks the relationship between her male and female characters, namely "the promise of tenderness versus the threat of violence". Krauss answered: "I've been drawn to many thin lines in my work." In her 2017 novel Forest Dark, the thin line was between one kind of life and another; the protagonist suddenly gives up his job and all his possessions to move to Israel. In Great House, published in 2010 and a finalist for the National Book award, lives are connected across continents and through catastrophic events by a wooden desk, and in Krauss's preceding novel, The History of Love, people living through different eras in Poland, Chile and the US are linked through a book and through the tenuous bonds of human affection. To Be a Man is full of thin lines. There's the thin line that connects one human being to another, the thin line between being the rebellious girl and becoming a victim, between what religion offers and how it constrains. There is also the line that connects the past to the present. "We were European Jews, even in America, which is to say that catastrophic things had happened and might happen again," declares a character on the first page. The same could be said of many of the protagonists in the 10 stories. Each lives under the weight of history, noted by Krauss sometimes almost in passing, as if to show that the history we are born with remains indelibly part of who we become. In the opening story, "Switzerland", Soraya, a girl with whom the narrator had shared a bedroom during a school year abroad, has gone missing. The girls think Soraya has run off with an older man, but the father's pain and fear for his daughter's fate is also rooted in what he has learned of the world. In "Zusya on the Roof", an elderly man carries away his newborn grandson moments before the child's circumcision ceremony: "Somewhere in the world there must be children born without precedent - the idea of it sent a shiver of awe down his spine." Few, if any, of Krauss's characters are born "without precedent", but they are sometimes forced to revise their inheritance. In the beautiful and elegiac "I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake", a New Yorker inherits her father's Tel Aviv apartment. She has known of its existence, but never visited, and comes to a realisation the moment she enters: "It was as if I was looking at my father's life upside down: this was his real home, and the apartment I had grown up in was merely the place he had stayed in when away from here." Along with the apartment and all his belongings, she also inherits a friend of her father's, who lets himself in with his own key and whose presence she at first resents. Later, she comes to view him with compassion, realising that he may have lost a daughter just as she has lost a father, and that now they have found each other. In "End of Days", Noa feels similarly betrayed by her parents, who have decided to end their long marriage without rancour. Each has left the country, landing Noa with the task of delivering the paperwork undoing their Orthodox wedding - performed merely to placate an older relative. Meanwhile the hills surrounding the unnamed city, which may be Los Angeles, are ablaze; everything is suddenly unfamiliar. As well as the divorce decree, Noa must deliver a bouquet of flowers to a bride who insists on continuing with her wedding day amid the fires, juxtaposing the end of one union with the start of another. Thin lines connect the characters across the world, from the US to Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Israel. One of the most unsettling pieces tells the story of a dying Jewish woman, born and raised on the east coast of America; it takes place in a refugee camp in an unnamed country, which could be the US in an alternative reality or imagined future. Through the narrator we learn of Sophie's lost love, a love she abandoned for reasons which, in the scheme of all that has occurred and of her impending and lonely death, now seem insignificant. A sense of displacement and fear pervades the collection. In "Future Emergencies", "after 9/11, after the establishment of Homeland Security, when the factory of America's imagination had achieved its peak production of threats, attacks, conspiracies", the inhabitants of an again unnamed city are issued with gas masks. A man puts his on and suddenly appears to his girlfriend as a different person: "ugly and menacing, a strange creature I'd never seen before". The past is reckoned with; the significance of events, relationships, even the meaning of films are reinterpreted. The question of who we are at different times and places, and with different people, comes masterfully to the fore in that final story, "To Be a Man". A couple narrate diverging versions of the end of a marriage while a German man tells his Jewish lover that he would have been a Nazi had he lived during the Third Reich - that he sees in himself all the attributes to make such a destiny, for someone like him, inevitable. How much do we really know ourselves and each other? These questions linger long after the final pages of this supremely intelligent collection.
Kirkus Review
Stories about women and men and the daily urgencies inherent to living more or less in the present. The latest collection of stories from Krauss is a wonder, with the author's signature straddling of the tragic and the absurd, her particularly Jewish frame of reference, and the extraordinary range of her narrative voice. One story traces the erotic awakenings of three young women; the next follows an older man named Brodman as he emerges from surgery to find his brand-new grandson about to undergo his bris. These stories are remarkable enough, but deep in the book, Krauss departs, ever so subtly, from a strict allegiance to realism. In the unsettlingly prescient "Future Emergencies," New York City residents are urged to wear the gas masks being distributed at designated centers. Nobody knows why, but the evening news is also providing instructions on how to safely seal windows and doors. "Amour" is set in a near future where whatever has happened to the world--war? devastating climate change?--goes unstated, but the main characters find themselves, as a result, in a refugee camp. And yet in both stories, the futuristic or, as it is sometimes called, "speculative" aspects are quietly located in the background. At the forefront of each is the relationship between a couple. In the end, perhaps that's what makes these tales so moving and so disconcerting. Brodman, out of surgery, realizes that "his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he'd had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years." A tremendous collection from an immensely talented writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In a first collection, National Book Award finalist Krauss (Great House) uses superbly controlled language to investigate how we become who we are. Having cheated death, elderly scholar Brodman feels his understanding of the world slipping away and ends up on the roof with his newborn grandson, while florist's assistant Noa faces the exigencies of her parents' divorce, the wedding she's supplying, and nearby California wildfires. Elsewhere, a woman recalls a teenage friend, heedless of the risks she took because "she was already broken, or she wasn't going to break." In one striking story, a woman who inherits the apartment of a father she barely visited learns that it's used by her father's old friend whenever he's in town: "I will get used to stepping over the stranger on my way to the kitchen because that is the way one lives." VERDICT Small gems, large ideas; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/6/20.]
Table of Contents
| Switzerland | p. 1 |
| Zusya on the Roof | p. 21 |
| I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake | p. 39 |
| End Days | p. 59 |
| Seeing Ershadi | p. 93 |
| Future Emergencies | p. 113 |
| Amour | p. 131 |
| In the Garden | p. 143 |
| The Husband | p. 159 |
| To Be a Man | p. 199 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 227 |
