In 1991, unhappily married Sylvie and her husband set off on a journey
across Eastern Europe in search of a Romanian orphan to adopt.
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 Torpor
Set 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. 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 is Kraus's most personal novel to date.
