‘What defines a life well-lived? Krauss winningly explores these and other weighty issues in a home run of a short story collection … Above all, these stories pay homage to strong women. As female characters mature, they find resilience in the power they wield despite societal constraints’ Booklist (starred review)
‘All the stories explore a central theme: What makes us who we are? They are intriguing, familiar, and ripe for discussion. In other words, they're book club gold’ Real Simple
Hailed by the New York Times as ‘one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation,’ and by the Financial Times as ‘one of the great novelists working today,’ NICOLE KRAUSS is the author of the novels Forest Dark, Great House, The History of Love, and Man Walks into a Room. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories anthology, and her books have been translated into thirty-seven languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
nicolekrauss.com
For Sasha and Cy
Also by Nicole Krauss
Man Walks Into a Room
The History of Love
Great House
Forest Dark
CONTENTS
- Switzerland
- Zusya on the Roof
- I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake
- End Days
- Seeing Ershadi
- Future Emergencies
- Amour
- In the Garden
- The Husband
- To Be a Man
- Acknowledgments
Switzerland
It’s been thirty years since I saw Soraya. In that time I tried to find her only once. I think I was afraid of seeing her, afraid of trying to understand her now that I was older and maybe could, which I suppose is the same as saying that I was afraid of myself: of what I might discover beneath my understanding. The years passed and I thought of her less and less. I went to university, then graduate school, got married sooner than I imagined and had two daughters only a year apart. If Soraya came to mind at all, flickering past in a mercurial chain of associations, she would recede again just as quickly.
I met Soraya when I was thirteen, the year that my family spent abroad in Switzerland. “Expect the worst” might have been the family motto, had my father not explicitly instructed us that it was “Trust no one, suspect everyone.” We lived on the edge of a cliff, though our house was impressive. We were European Jews, even in America, which is to say that catastrophic things had happened, and might happen again. Our parents fought violently, their marriage forever on the verge of collapse. Financial ruin also loomed; we were warned that the house would soon have to be sold. No money had come in since our father left the family business after years of daily screaming battles with our grandfather. When our father went back to school, I was two, my brother four. Premed courses were followed by medical school at Columbia, then a residency in orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery, though what kind of special we didn’t know. During those eleven years of training, my father logged countless nights on call in the emergency room, greeting a grisly parade of victims: car crashes, motorcycle accidents, and once the crash of an Avianca airplane headed for Bogotá that nosedived into a hill in Cove Neck. At bottom, he might have clung to the superstitious belief that his nightly confrontations with horror could save his family from it. But on a stormy September afternoon in my father’s final year of residency, my grandmother was hit by a speeding van on the corner of First Avenue and Fiftieth Street, causing hemorrhaging in her brain. When my father got to Bellevue Hospital, his mother was lying on a stretcher in the emergency room. She squeezed his hand and slipped into a coma. Six weeks later, she died. Less than a year after her death, my father finished his residency and moved our family to Switzerland, where he began a fellowship in trauma.