To Be a Man

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES, ESQUIRE, O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE, TIME MAGAZINE, LITHUB AND BUSTLE

‘Subtle and elegant’ Daily Mail

‘Although women take the lead roles in these remarkable short stories, a dazzling cast of characters spin in their orbit. Themes of power, desire and familial crisis – often set within a wider context of Jewishness – are probed unflinchingly and, at times, with eerie prescience’

Financial Times, Books of the Year

‘Through her beautifully detailed, immersive portrayals, novelist Nicole Krauss explores gender, power and aging … together, the ten stories reflect on what does – and does not – make men and women different’ Time, 100 Must Read Books 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 rigour … 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’ New York Times Book Review

‘Krauss’s short stories feel like they could each be unspooled into novels of their own … To Be a Man’s tenseness and uncertainties are strangely suited to the current moment’ Wall Street Journal, Best Books of the Autumn

‘One of the great novelists working today … Her power lies not simply in her own ability to interrogate life – but in the way she calls on her readers to do the same’ Financial Times

‘One of our most formidable talents in fiction … From a contemporary master comes 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’ Esquire

‘Recent first collections of short stories from established novelists such as Zadie Smith, Joseph O'Neill and Jeffrey Eugenides have provided a concentration of high-quality writing, their tales cherry picked from decades of successful publication. Nicole Krauss's debut collection, To Be a Man, joins those ranks’ Times Literary Supplement

‘An intoxicating blend that plumbs the depths of the human condition … A nuanced, provocative exploration on what it means to be human’ Irish Times

‘These ten stories – which focus on the relationships between daughters and their fathers, teenage girls and their older lovers, dancers and choreographers – show us that authority and control are subtle, slippery things, not permanently possessed by one gender’ Stylist

‘The acclaimed novelist’s first short story collection is a marvel’ Herald

‘Stunning. Intellectually and emotionally intelligent and immaculately written’ Louise Kennedy

‘A collection of wonders … To Be a Man offers the pleasure of being in the company of Krauss’ surprising, challenging mind, tugged along by an imagination that’s ever curious about the limits and possibilities of fiction, of time, and of love’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘A sustained shot of brilliance. By turns tight and exuberant, disciplined and expansive, the collection shimmers with insight and moments of perfectly realized beauty. It provokes unabashed laughter, it inspires profound thinking, it delights and disturbs in equal measure’ Boston Globe

‘These stories put Krauss's lyric, precise prose – and, more importantly, her inquisitive and unsparing mind – on full display … The title story is at once moving and pitiless. It is a daring story even in the context of a daring collection, and it proves wholly that aesthetic simplicity has not reduced the scope of Krauss's intellectual and creative powers at all’ NPR

‘Reading To Be a Man feels like talking all night to a brilliant friend … this fine collection continues to haunt a reader's heart and mind’ Washington Post

‘Brilliant, beautifully crafted … Many of the stories examine the ethical, emotional, and experiential legacies that parents and friends pass on to the next generation … With exceptional precision, concision, grace, wisdom, and insight, Nicole Krauss creates a magnificent collection of stories that explore what the narrator effectively asks her son in the last lines of the final tale: Who will you be?’ New York Journal of Books

‘Serpentine short stories that plumb human bonds and self-exploration, in settings from Tel Aviv to post-9/11 New York’ Vanity Fair

‘A beautiful, unique book … Krauss’s creative framing, perspective, focus on love, sex, motherhood, and foreign lands are the common elements found throughout this extraordinary collection’ Chicago Review of Books

‘This collection delves into the mysteries of relationships and sexuality … In every story, tiny details and emotional acuity provide a vivid look at how life goes on’ Entertainment Weekly

‘Many of the themes that appear in the rest of Krauss’ oeuvre are also present here: the tensions between community and isolation, between religious legacy and individual freedom, between the needs of the body and the desires of the mind … To Be a Man is a collection to get lost in. And when one emerges on the other side, the world still shimmers with possibility’ Washington Review of Books

‘Smart, sad and funny explorations of identity and purpose, and of tradition embraced or thwarted’ Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘Krauss’s first story collection succinctly but brilliantly examines sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery and growing older through unforgettable characters in contemporary New York City, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Japan and Southern California … Krauss is incredibly adept at portraying novel-worthy characters in this much shorter form’ PureWow

‘Deeply satisfying … Each tale in the book bends the formal possibilities of the short story in a pleasurably elastic way. Krauss’ ability to tackle novel-worthy subjects at compact length is particularly bracing’ Seattle Times

‘This triumphant first collection from Nicole Krauss crisscrosses the globe in 10 ambitious stories written over two decades that wrestle with sexuality, desire, and human connection … This is a spectacular book’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

‘This 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 … A tremendous collection from an immensely talented writer’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘A virtuoso performance … transporting throughout … Krauss displays an ability to capture the hearts and minds of men and women alike … A high point in fiction in 2020’ artsfuse

‘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

1. Switzerland
2. Zusya on the Roof
3. I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake
4. End Days
5. Seeing Ershadi
6. Future Emergencies
7. Amour
8. In the Garden
9. The Husband
10. To Be a Man
11. 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.

That Switzerland—neutral, alpine, orderly—has the best institute for trauma in the world seems paradoxical. The whole country had, back then, the atmosphere of a sanatorium or asylum. Instead of padded walls it had the snow, which muffled and softened everything, until after so many centuries the Swiss just went about instinctively muffling themselves. Or that was the point: a country singularly obsessed with controlled reserve and conformity, with engineering watches, with the promptness of trains, would, it follows, have an advantage in the emergency of a body smashed to pieces. That Switzerland is also a country of many languages is what granted my brother and me unexpected reprieve from the familial gloom. The institute was in Basel, where the language is Schweizerdeutsch, but my mother was of the opinion that we should continue our French. Schweizerdeutsch was only a hairbreadth removed from Deutsch, and we were not allowed to touch anything even remotely Deutsch, the language of our maternal grandmother, whose entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. We were therefore enrolled in the École Internationale in Geneva. My brother lived in the boardinghouse on campus, but as I’d just turned thirteen, I didn’t make the cutoff. To save me from the traumas associated with Deutsch, a solution was found for me in the western outskirts of Geneva, and in September 1987 I became a boarder in the home of a substitute English teacher named Mrs. Elderfield. She had hair dyed the color of straw, and the rosy cheeks of someone raised in a damp climate, but she seemed old all the same.

My small bedroom had a window that looked onto an apple tree. On the day that I arrived, red apples were fallen all around it, rotting in the autumn sun. Inside the room was a small desk, a reading chair, and a bed at whose foot was folded a gray wool army blanket old enough to have been used in a world war. The brown carpet was worn down to the weave at the threshold.

Two other boarders, both eighteen, shared the back bedroom at the end of the hall. All three of our narrow beds had once belonged to Mrs. Elderfield’s sons, but they had grown up and moved away long before we girls arrived to occupy them. There were no photographs of her boys, so we never knew what they looked like, but we rarely forgot that they had once slept in our beds. Between Mrs. Elderfield’s absent sons and us there was a carnal link. There was also no mention of Mrs. Elderfield’s husband, if she’d ever had one. She was not the sort of person who invited personal questions. When it was time to sleep, she switched off our lights without a word.

On my first evening in the house, I sat on the floor of the older girls’ room among their piles of clothes. Back home, the girls sprayed themselves with a cheap men’s cologne called Drakar. But the strong perfume that permeated these girls’ clothes was unfamiliar to me. Mixed with their body heat and the chemistry of their skin, it mellowed, but from time to time it built up so strongly in their bedsheets and tossed-off shirts and bags that Mrs. Elderfield forced open the windows, and the cold air once again stripped everything bare.

I listened as the older girls discussed their lives in coded words I didn’t understand. They laughed at my naïveté, but they were both only ever kind to me. Marie had come from Bangkok via Boston, and Soraya from the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris via Tehran, where her father had been the royal engineer to the shah before the revolution had sent their family into exile, too late to pack Soraya’s toys but in time to transfer most of their liquid assets. Wildness—sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply—is what had landed them both in Switzerland for an extra year of school, a thirteenth year that previously neither of them had ever heard of.

We used to set out for school in the dark. To get to the bus stop, we had to cross a field, which by November was covered in snow that the sheared brown stalks sworded through. We were always late. I was always the only one who’d eaten. Someone’s hair was always wet, the ends frozen. We huddled under the enclosure, inhaling secondhand smoke from Soraya’s cigarette. The bus took us past the Armenian church to the orange tram. Then it was a long ride to the school on the other side of the city. Because of our different schedules we rode back alone. Only on the first day, at Mrs. Elderfield’s insistence, did Marie and I meet up to travel together, but we took the tram in the wrong direction and ended up in France. After that I learned the way, and usually I broke up the journey by stopping in the tobacco shop next to the tram stop, where before catching the bus I bought myself some candy from the open containers that, according to my mother, were crawling with strangers’ germs.

I’d never been so happy or so free. It wasn’t only the difficult and anxious atmosphere of our family that I’d gotten away from but also my miserable school back home, with its petty, hormonal girls, olympic in their cruelty. I was too young for a driver’s license, so there was never any means of escape except through books or walking in the woods behind our house. Now I spent the hours after school wandering the city of Geneva. I never had any destination, though I often ended up by the lake, where I watched the tourist cruises come and go, or invented stories about the people I saw, especially the ones who came to make out on the benches. Sometimes I tried on clothes at H&M, or wandered around the Old City, where I was drawn back to the imposing monument to the Reformation, to the inscrutable faces of towering stone Protestants of whose names I can only recall John Calvin’s. I hadn’t yet heard of Borges, and yet at no other time in my life was I closer to the Argentine writer who had died in Geneva the year before, and who, in a letter explaining his wish to be buried in his adopted city, wrote that there he had always felt “mysteriously happy.” Years later, a friend gave me Borges’s Atlas, and I was startled to see a huge photo of those somber giants I used to visit regularly, anti-Semites all, who believed in predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God. In it John Calvin leans slightly forward to gaze down at the blind Borges, seated on the stone ledge holding his cane, chin tilted upward. Between John Calvin and Borges, the photo seemed to say, there was a great attunement. There was no attunement between John Calvin and me, but I too had sat on that same ledge looking up at him.