“Krug” publishing house
In the “Reading” column, Dnevnik publishes an excerpt from “Being a Man”, authored by Nicole Kraus, provided by “Krug” Publishing House
The literary sensation Nicole Kraus with her first collection of short stories in Bulgarian. The ten stories in Being a Man have won worldwide critical acclaim
The first collection of stories by Nicole Krauss, named by the “New York Times” as an “international literary sensation”, will be published in Bulgarian on March 16. “To be a man”, a brilliant collection of ten stories – as different as they are echoing in sonorous harmony – is translated by Vladimir Germanov, with a cover by Sofia Popyordanova and with the mark of ed. “Circle”.
Having won heaps of praise from the world’s literary critics, the book collects stories that cross the boundaries of geography and the conventional. Like Kraus’s novels, which the Bulgarian reader already knows, the stories in this book delve into the themes of memory, spirituality and, above all, relationships between people.
Each story in Being a Man has its own uniqueness and intriguing logic, each subject to a different structure, voice and logic, and yet page after page the texts sound in remarkable balance and leave the feeling of smoothly sinking into an intricate novel.
From a girl who cohabits with a girl who disappeared after a forbidden affair with a married rich man, to a grandfather on the verge of death who carried his newborn grandson on the run moments before his circumcision ritual, to a German boxer who tells his Jewish lover that if had he lived during the Third Reich, he would surely have been a Nazi – each of the characters in “Being a Man” is an ordinary man, placed under the weight of memory and history, on the threshold of realizing who he really is and what he will become.
“An exceptional collection Krauss’s short stories capture people in those moments when they are hungry for experience and open to new possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves – hard alive for tight storylines, simplistic solutions, or easy answers,” writes the New York Times Book Review,” and the Boston Globe added: “Being a Man is an extraordinary book that provokes genuine laughter, inspires deep thought, delights and disturbs in equal measure.”
Nicole Krauss (b. 1974) is an American writer whose four novels brought her worldwide fame. Translated into over 35 languages, her books have been repeatedly honored with literary awards, including the international “Saroyan” award and the French prize for the best foreign book. Nicole Krauss is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and more.
Her first collection of short stories, Being a Man, won the prestigious Wingate Prize, whose laureates have included Zadie Smith, Etgar Kerret and David Grossman.
As a reader of “Dnevnik”, you can buy the book with a special discount of at least 10% in Ozone.bg. The code for it is 10Dnevnik. Order the book here.
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Excerpt from “Being a Man” by Nicole Krauss
Switzerland
It’s been thirty years since I saw Soraya. During that time, I only tried to find her once. I think I was afraid to see her, afraid to try to understand her now that I was older and might be able to, like I was afraid of myself—of what I might find in the underworld of his enlightenment. The years passed and I thought about her less and less. I went to university, then started graduate school, got married sooner than I had imagined, and had two daughters a year apart. If I thought of Soraya at all—a flash of the past amid a series of fleeting associations—the thought vanished just as quickly.
I met her when I was thirteen, the year my family spent abroad in Switzerland. “Expect the worst” might have been my family’s motto if my father hadn’t instructed us in no uncertain terms that it was “Trust no one, suspect everyone.” We lived on the edge of a sheer cliff, although our house was imposing. We were European Jews, even in America, which meant that catastrophic things had happened to us and could happen again. Our parents fought fiercely, their marriage was constantly on the brink.
Financial bankruptcy was also looming over the horizon – we were warned that the house would soon have to be sold. There had been no money coming in since our father left the family business after years of scandalous warfare with our grandfather. When our father returned to teaching, I was two, my brother was four, our sister was not yet born. First pre-med courses, then medicine at Columbia, then a residency in the orthopedic clinic at the Hospital for Special Surgery, though we didn’t know exactly in what sense “special.”
During the eleven years he was in school, our father spent countless nights on call in the emergency room, where he met a grisly parade of casualties: crushed cars, motorcycle accidents, once even an Avianca plane crash that flew to Bogota and crashed into mountainside at Cove Neck. Deep down, he may have clung to the superstition that daily exposure to horror could rid his own family.
One rainy September afternoon, however, a beefed-up pickup truck hit my grandmother at the corner of First Avenue and Fiftieth Street, causing a brain hemorrhage. When my father got to Bellevue Hospital, his mother was on a stretcher in the emergency room. She shook his hand and fell into a coma. He died six weeks later. Less than a year after her death, my father finished his specialization and moved our family to Switzerland, where he began an internship as a traumatologist.
That Switzerland – neutral, alpine, orderly – has the best trauma institute in the whole world seems paradoxical. The atmosphere throughout the country then was reminiscent of a sanatorium or psychiatric clinic.
Instead of upholstered walls, there was snow that silenced and softened everything, after so many centuries the Swiss had continued to instinctively silence themselves. Or there was the work – a country meticulously keeping to controlled restraint and conformity, creating clocks, with its precise trains, would therefore have an advantage in the urgent care of dismembered bodies.
This Switzerland is also a country of many languages, and this provided me and my brother with an unexpected escape from the family darkness. The institute was in Basel, where it was spoken Swiss German[1]however, my mother thought we should continue with French. Swiss German was very close to Deutsch[2]and we were not allowed to touch anything that even remotely resembled it Deutschthe language of our maternal grandmother, whose family was completely exterminated by the Nazis.
Because of this, we were enrolled in International School[3] in Geneva. My brother lived in the dorm on campus, but I was only thirteen and not old enough. To save me from the trauma associated with Deutsch, a solution was found for me in the western suburbs of Geneva, and in September 1987 I became a lodger in the home of a substitute English teacher named Mrs. Elderfield. Her hair was dyed like straw, and she had the rosy cheeks of one who grew up in a humid climate. Like – she looked old.
The window of my little room looked out upon an apple tree. On the day of my arrival, red apples were swarming around it, rotting in the autumn sun. The room had a small desk, a reading chair, and a bed, at the bottom of which was folded a military blanket old enough to have been used in some world war. In front of the threshold, the brown carpet was rubbed to the threads.
Two other boarders, each eighteen, shared the back room at the end of the corridor. Our three narrow beds had once belonged to Mrs. Elderfield’s sons, who had grown up and gone long before we girls went there. There were no pictures of her boys, so we had no idea what they looked like, but we rarely forgot that they had once slept in our beds. There was a carnal connection between Mrs. Elderfield’s absent sons and us.
There was never any mention of Mrs. Elderfield’s husband, if she ever had one. He wasn’t one for personal matters. When it was time to sleep, he turned off our lights without saying a word.
On my first night in the house, I sat on the floor of the older lodgers’ room among piles of their clothes. The girls at home were spritzing themselves with a cheap men’s cologne called Dracar Noir. However, I was unfamiliar with the strong perfume with which the clothes of my housemates were soaked. Mixed with the heat from their bodies and the chemistry of their skin, the smell softened, but sometimes rose so strongly from the quilts and thrown sheets that Mrs. Elderfield had to open the windows to allow the cold air to strip everything bare again.
I listened to the elders discuss their lives in coded words I did not understand. They laughed at my naivety, but both were always nice to me. Marie was from Bangkok, came via Boston, and Soraya from Tehran, then the Sixteenth Arrondissement in Paris. Her father had been a chess engineer before the revolution and had gone into exile with his family too late to get Soraya’s toys, but still in time to transfer most of their liquid assets. The debauchery – sex, stimulants, defiance – had sent them both to Switzerland to spend an extra year of finishing school, a thirteenth year neither of them had ever heard of.
[1] Swiss German – collective term for the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. – Bell. row
[2] German. – Bell. row
[3] Prestigious international school founded in 1924 – Bel. row
