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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2020, 240 pages
Paperback:
Nov 2021, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Karen Lewis
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In this dazzling collection of short fiction, the National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The History of Love - "one of America's most important novelists and an international literary sensation" (New York Times) - explores what it means to be in a couple, and to be a man and a woman in that perplexing relationship and beyond.
In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.
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...
Throughout the book, Krauss weaves present-time situations with emotional, ancestral echoes of destruction and deep, unburied grief. The past continues to propel her characters as they find courage to build new lives and relationships; most grapple with the Holocaust's traumatic abyss. The narrative lens consistently blurs elements of time and place, then zooms into scenes that uncover a common humanity. Most of the stories in the book feature unnamed narrators, and overlaps between characters in different stories are occasionally hinted at but not overt. Each story here stands well alone, yet there are shared currents of theme and geography...continued
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(Reviewed by Karen Lewis).
In To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss, a character in the story "End Days" is an archaeologist working at Tel Megiddo, the site of the ancient Palestinian city of Megiddo, which is situated near present-day Haifa, Israel. "Tel" refers to the "mound" on the site in which excavations have uncovered 26 layers of remains of ancient civilizations that date back more than 4,000 years.
Megiddo was originally a strategic settlement on a trade route that linked Mesopotamia with Egypt. Historians believe the site was inhabited as early as 7,000 BCE. Artifacts from the Bronze Age and Iron Age, along with funerary items including gold, ivory, ceramics and bones reveal a complex history of habitation and eventual demise. Noted structural remains ...
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