This talented and successful novelist came out in November with her first collection of short stories. Much of the collection has been published in one or another of the leading American magazines, two of these then republished in Best American Short Stories in 2003 and 2019. The first, “Switzerland”, was published in The New Yorker in November. It tells the story of Soraya, a sexually and emotionally precocious classmate our teenage narrator befriended in school in Geneva. It’s a coming-of-age story, so delicately drawn it transports even an old man back to the time when sex was mysterious and frightening and fun, all at the same time—even, indeed perhaps especially, when you were in over your head. “Zusya on the Roof” is a nearly inscrutable parable, about an old man who has survived a fortnight at death’s door, trying to retrieve the insights all the delirium had yielded (if he had it right). “Restored to life, he could no longer parse the infinite wisdom of the dead.” I found it lacking, to be honest; and I found “I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake” completely inscrutable, never a good thing in a short story. Both of these stories, and several others included here, are examples of the writer’s turn toward postmodernism, perhaps having become bored with writing just good literary fiction. Eventually I came to one that had not been previously published. “Amour” is largely the story of Sophie and Ezra, who had a long relationship that satisfied them both over a span of many years. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who knew Sophie “when we were very young,” but was never able to win her heart, especially after she met Ezra. He’s always wondered why Sophie and Ezra never married. When he spots her, many years later, in a refugee camp, she tells of how they broke up after all the years. The vignette is so simple and yet so powerful that I dare not give any of it away, for it holds in it a jewel that shines the brightest light on what long, loving marriages that go the distance are made of; and why some relationships that otherwise could make it, do not. So simple and so true, we have here a gleaming example of what great short stories are made of. It alone is worth the cost of the collection, because you can’t read it anywhere else . . . yet. Look for it next year in Best American Short Stories of 2020, is my bet. Another contender for that volume is “The Husband”. Here we meet a pair of adult siblings, their respective mates come and gone, and a stranger who’s come in a mysterious way to befriend their widowed mother, who’s nobody’s fool. At the center of the story is the grown daughter, Tamar, who is so full of suspicion about the stranger and his intentions toward her mother, she can’t see past all that to the happiness it may promise. Told in five chapters, we get some wonderful lengthy digressions, in one of which we learn not only more about the characters, but more about Alzheimer’s disease—what it is and isn’t—than I’ve ever been able to piece together. It’s a story told on a high wire, that itself delivers “the awareness that the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without our having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.” I look forward to digging into one of Krauss’s four novels. A bit of research suggests the last three have been more post-modernisms, which is not particularly tempting to this old coot. But I welcome any of your suggestions. P.S. 1/10/21 I hadn't read the last story in the collection when I wrote the review above. It's the title story, "To Be a Man", and it's the best in the whole collection, and the contender for the Best Stories volume, hands down. First rate literary fiction with a bit of post-modernism structure. Just the right balance. Bravo.
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Matthew GeyerMatthew Geyer is the author of two novels, Strays (2008) and Atlantic View (2020). . Archives
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