If you’ve followed Krauss from novel to novel—it’s probably obvious that I have—to read this new collection of stories written and published over the past 20 years is a bit like flipping through a photo album of Krauss’ writerly obsessions, the pages full of reflections of characters and cities and themes that feel hauntingly (and sometimes thrillingly) familiar ... Krauss’ New York, her Tel Aviv, are vividly captured in this newest book, a continuation of maps she has been drawing for years. Many of the stories explore the intersections of Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life. Stylistically, active scenes are often deprioritized for a kind of meditative, scenic mindscape across which time and memory flow freely, a technique deployed in Forest Dark. Several stories have an elliptical, fragmented structure that implicate the reader in the process of piecing the narrative together ... This is not to suggest that the stories in To Be a Man read like testing grounds for Krauss’ novels, or drafts of questions that find their deepest expression in those longer works ... a collection of wonders, though how those wonders resonate for each reader will be different depending on their relationship to her work. But for fans and newcomers alike, 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.
Ralph Ellison said that 'some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.' I returned to this idea again and again while reading Nicole Krauss’s superb new collection, To Be a Man. In each of these moving stories, we feel the weight not only of family, but of history and faith and leaving a legacy, pressing down on every one of her characters. Birth and death, joy and mourning, love and heartbreak — these too animate the collection. But as a writer Krauss is less interested in describing life’s grand explosions than she is in showing how people make sense of the rubble ... Despite the common threads, Krauss still somehow seems to have invented a new form for each novel, each story — their characters so fully realized that Krauss’s deft authorial hand is rarely evident. Her characters seem to dictate how their own stories ought to be told ... Krauss’s refusal to adhere to formal conventions, in time frame or plot resolution, for example, gives her stories a certain energy, consistently conjuring an aura of both intimacy and vastness ... 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.
There are many pleasures to be had from reading the stories in To Be a Man, though I suspect the main effect for many Krauss admirers will be impatience to get their hands on her next full-length work ... That potent figure so familiar to us from the novels—a difficult, egotistical father—makes several appearances ... 'Seeing Ershadi' is a strange and evocative story that, while straining credulity, manages to ring emotionally true. In another, less convincing one, 'Amour,' we are asked to believe that one of the characters can recall every detail, from dialogue to camera angles, of numerous movies she saw decades ago ... What puzzled me about 'Amour' was the setting: 'one of the refugee camps' ... That they are in a place of grievous suffering is made vivid enough, but if there was a good reason to use it as a backdrop for a love story that did not in any way require such a setting, I could not see it ... The use of both the refugee camp and the gas masks seemed to me like examples of the hook that writers are often encouraged to sink into the reader’s mind with their opening sentences. That device can serve a story well, of course, but since Krauss never engages with the difficult reality of either of these extreme situations, the hook ends up dangling like an upside-down question mark ... Female as well as male power is represented in the collection, with deft capturings of that thrilling but perilous moment when a girl sees herself for the first time through adult men’s eyes ... Unlike so often elsewhere in Krauss’s fiction, at no point in the narrative [of 'End Days'] are we asked to suspend disbelief in order to fully understand or enjoy it. It is the collection’s shining example of just how much enchantment this capable writer can make out of ordinary people, dear ordinary people living their sweet messy everyday lives.
... 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. The stories are wildly varied in place (Japan, Israel, New York, California), tone (comic,somber, manic, restrained), and voice (male, female, young, old, first person, third person, and a blend of the two) ... The range of topics and styles reflects Krauss' multifaceted talent. She is equally adept at Malamud-esque fabulism and tragi-comedy, dystopian darkness and light-filled wit, mythic resonance and contemporary detail, breathless narrative that digresses, bubbles over, or hurtles forward at a breakneck pace and stark, measured reflections in the vein of Rachel Cusk ... Throughout, Krauss exquisitely depicts and inspires what one of her characters calls 'the peculiar ache of being alive.' Joy and woe are woven fine in this extraordinary book.
The writer Nicole Krauss has, in the last two decades, acquired an enormous, devoted, and deserved readership. Her novels, which tend to juxtapose the broad philosophic questions of how to be human with the narrower — though still large and perplexing — issues of how to be a contemporary Jew, work in the magic-adjacent tradition of Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka, with a little Rothian earthiness mixed in. The short stories in To Be a Man, which is Krauss's first collection, are as philosophically inclined as her novels, but in other ways, they represent a significant and exciting departure from her previous body of work ... the collection has no weak links. However, it does have a standout: The title story is the collection's best, likely because it melds Krauss's two major lines of inquiry. 'To Be a Man' seeks a new and nonviolent order for both Jews and men ... 'To Be a Man' 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.
The stories seem to push the boundary of how many voices can reflect on each other, drawing each to their respective apex not by some intervention of plot, tying them all together with a bow, but rather through a growing exploration of how varied reflections of similar themes endlessly multiply one another, amassing a picture of something far larger than what any one perspective could yield ... this collection seeks that expansiveness through her telltale style and interest. Tonally, the stories emerge in a blurry haze, as if the focus in their shot belongs to a backdrop of the past, of history and memory, that haunts the landscape despite being cropped from the final frame, leaving the nearby undefined and ungrounded ... Set in these crises, the stories introduce a new dimension to processing already-fraught realities—a move admirable, at the very least, for how it allows Krauss to apply her retrospective lens even to our present world, casting it in sepia, a new sort of history. Despite the way in which past and future temporalities can seem to distract from the action of the stories, finding their weight through indirect means, these rotations of perspective—alongside cutting insights into psychology that Krauss sprinkles liberally across her work—create a gem of a collection, elevating the many merits of each individual story to a synergistic swirl of pleasure and beauty.
... the title story...is as brilliant in execution as it is a pleasure to get lost in the stream of consciousness that creates the story itself. This kind of depth and structural experimentation is what makes To Be a Man such a beautiful, unique book. Written with spare yet graceful prose, Krauss’s stories are intimate. They read like a secret between friends. There’s something otherworldly about Krauss’s work. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s a sense of dreaming. The stories are realist in approach, certainly, but there’s a ruminating quality that reminds me of Patrick Modiano’s prose ... Several themes sew the book together, but the one that strikes me most is distance and its barriers. The stories are international, spanning New York, to Switzerland, to Latin America, to Tel Aviv, the grounding city in the collection. The push and pull between home and afar is an anxiety that adds necessary tension to Krauss’s subtle style.
... it is as brilliant in execution as it is a pleasure to get lost in the stream of consciousness that creates the story itself. This kind of depth and structural experimentation is what makes To Be a Man such a beautiful, unique book ... Written with spare yet graceful prose, Krauss’s stories are intimate. They read like a secret between friends. There’s something otherworldly about Krauss’s work ... there’s a ruminating quality that reminds me of Patrick Modiano’s prose ... The stories are international, spanning New York, to Switzerland, to Latin America, to Tel Aviv, the grounding city in the collection. The push and pull between home and afar is an anxiety that adds necessary tension to Krauss’s subtle style ... While the unknown haunts these stories, perhaps the most significant consideration for Krauss is the concept of love as a union. Divorce appears in almost every story, and often protagonists discuss the desire to never marry again ... Krauss’s characters dig and rake at the debris of their lives, searching for something, looking into daily activities for meaning.
... like talking all night with a brilliant friend ... Krauss imbues her prose with authoritative intensity. In short, her work feels lived. Some of these stories appeared earlier, in the New Yorker and elsewhere. But re-encountering them in a collection lets us absorb them as siblings ... Krauss’s explorations of interior struggle press on, unflinching; aperçus feel wrested from depths ... With chilling casualness, Krauss conveys the murderous realities lurking behind the scrim of social surfaces, that young women routinely face ... Settings range globally without fanfare, as do Krauss’s gelid portraits of modern arrangements ... the hallucinatory 'Seeing Ershadi,' in which a dancer and her friend become obsessed with an Iranian actor, seems to distill the strange urgency of Krauss’s art ... What Ershadi represents to the women slowly unfurls, and (like much of this fine collection) continues to haunt a reader’s mind and heart.
Krauss has explored many of these themes - migration, family expectations and power dynamics between men and women - in her previous novels... A lot is implicit; we are inside the characters’ heads, noticing the significance of where peoples’ gazes land and reading meanings into certain gestures ... Krauss’s writing is beguiling and elegant but I wish she had taken some of the narratives further. She teases the reader offering just enough to pique our interest but then leaving us in suspense with images that linger, making us wonder what happened to all these complicated lives.
Existential questions about place and time, with its 'reckless authority', and about Israel and Jewishness as well what it means to be in a relationship, whether as a woman or as a man, recur in To Be a Man , and these ten stories encompass an excitingly wide range of characters, ages (Krauss is very good on teenage girls), tones – often wryly funny - and settings ... The thrust of the story is not entirely clear and there’s something unsatisfying about its open-endedness. Soraya’s influence on the narrator is peripheral. But it’s the narrator’s own daughter who has something about her that reminds her unsettlingly, half a lifetime later, of Soraya’s dangerous curiosity in her own power, its reach and limit. There are other stories that are not wholly successful.
Nicole Krauss’ new book of short stories generates a curious, understated, but genuinely transporting spirit, pretty much throughout ... Many of the stories here have a woman narrator behind them; anyone who imagines the book’s title suggests some feminist diatribe or something like it is mistaken. Krauss displays an ability to capture the hearts and minds of men and women alike ... Krauss has a way of evoking places, atmospheres, and feeling with a spare subtlety that is very effective.
... as [Krauss'] new collection of short stories shows, 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
... One of Krauss’s gifts is her ability to instantly conjure up the intimacies of a world while probing it ... proves that the talent is not limited by a word count. Krauss can create a place in a phrase...Her characters also emerge real and fully formed ... The primary problem for this collection is likely to be the greedy demands of a fan base who are used to gorging on her novels and may be left wanting more. Yet a tantalising glimpse of a universe that exists just for a moment is surely the definition of a good short story ... It is true, however, that in a couple of the works here, you sense that the bare bones of the genre are not enough to flesh out Krauss’s bigger thought experiments ... Krauss’s questing intelligence is not for escapists, and readers who want distraction from the Covid-19 news cycle should take particular care ... Krauss’s writing is as lyrical as ever; beautiful phrases just keep on coming ... Krauss can also be wryly funny.
Ironically, the problem is that these leaps into unreason can feel formulaic. Adultery and natural disasters are freighted with overt symbolic meanings that tend to lessen the insecurity they’re intended to produce. Is there anything more difficult for a skilled, sensible writer than to reinvent herself? Ms. Krauss isn’t quite there yet, but it’s well worth following her journey.
... [a] brilliant, beautifully-crafted short story collection ... Krauss’ pithy, perfectly pitched, precise prose, which she conveys through first-person female and male narrators as well as third-person narrators, proffers profound, sometimes wry or funny observations about what it means to be human ... Krauss is a keen observer of human nature, speech, and of the environments she depicts ... 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?
[Krauss's] latest short-story collection reads like a catalog of her maturation, covering years of work that delves into the mysteries of relationships and sexuality. 'Future Emergencies,' first published in 2002, is set after 9/11 and depicts a New York haunted by vague warnings and mask-wearing; its resonance is chilling. The more recent 'I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake' is a devastating tale of grief. In every story, tiny details and emotional acuity provide a vivid look at how life goes on.
The stories with a third-person narrator allow Krauss to follow her characters’ lead; these are the richest, most populated stories, with a focus on immediate concerns and less of an interest in absences and reveries ... The titular story contains some of the collection’s most spectacular writing, effectively, swiftly building tension between two characters ... Krauss’ stories beautifully examine this territory of uncertainty.
With stories accordingly spanning two decades, this collection serves to collate Krauss’s existing body of short-form work, with some new additions, as opposed to the author creating a deliberate compilation of new work linked by theme or intention. That is not to suggest, however, that the stories are totally discordant with each other ... Krauss has reflected upon the Jewish immigrant experience akin to that of her parents throughout her writing career and her nuanced examination of that community permeates this collection. The result is an accomplished anthology that spans the globe as Krauss wrestles with many of the ideas addressed in her four novels: identity, fragmentary lives, connection and disconnection, sexual politics, faith, desire, and the complex dynamics of relationships ... The real strength of this collection lies in her ability to walk a precarious narrative tightrope. The author expertly articulates the tensions that exist within and between people as they navigate their relationship with themselves and others without ever feeling compelled to resolve those tensions or make final judgments ... In a #MeToo world where previously accepted ideas of masculinity are finally being dismantled, this collection successfully inhabits multifaceted male characters and allows them to exist in their full complexities ... Krauss is exceptionally good at articulating both sexual dynamics and the intergenerational shifts between parents and their offspring as culture and society evolves ... End Days perhaps best encapsulates Krauss’s literary prowess at elevating the ordinary life into the realm of the extraordinary ... As a calling card for the novels, this collection delivers a strong indication of how electrifying her writing can be. It also holds its own, however, as a powerful literary body in its own right – a nuanced, provocative exploration on what it means to be human.
To Be a Man is full of thin lines. There’s the thin line that connects one human being to another, the thin line between being the rebellious girl and becoming a victim, between what religion offers and how it constrains. There is also the line that connects the past to the present ... Few, if any, of Krauss’s characters are born 'without precedent', but they are sometimes forced to revise their inheritance ... A sense of displacement and fear pervades the collection ... The past is reckoned with; the significance of events, relationships, even the meaning of films are reinterpreted. The question of who we are at different times and places, and with different people, comes masterfully to the fore in that final story, To Be a Mam ... How much do we really know ourselves and each other? These questions linger long after the final pages of this supremely intelligent collection.
To Be a Man , a collection of short stories Krauss has published over the course of her career, features a cast of characters similar to those in her novels, most of them well-educated, cosmopolitan Jews, frequent flyers between New York City and Tel Aviv. But the tone, particularly in the more recent stories, such as Switzerland and To Be a Man is decidedly more jaded, and the collection as a whole might be read as a rejoinder to the earlier criticisms, proof that she has put away childish things and is ready to grapple with the ugly, cruel, and irredeemable aspects of adult life. To be a man, the book suggests, is to be capable of terrifying violence. What Lorentzen describes as her 'cuddly portraits of aging men' have been replaced by figures considerably more sinister ... a sustained exploration of gender roles and their destructive consequences ... One thing her collection seems keen to emphasize is the role the women’s desires play in exposing them to the subjugating force of men, desires that would appear to render them complicit in their own victimization ... Repeatedly throughout the collection, women regard sexual intimacy with aggressive men as a strategy for appropriating their power; they long to get as close as they can, not because they want to be with, but because they want to be these me ... Trying to stop the violence of men, she suggests, is like trying to stop the sea from breaking against the shore. Some readers will no doubt find this final note of fatalism disappointing—a refusal of the responsibility to take a stronger political stance. To others, Krauss’s evocation of a power so awful and ubiquitous that no act of creative magic can diminish its force will seem the very mark of her maturity.
There is a compelling symmetry at play here, with the opening and closing stories exploring what it means to step through the threshold of pubescence and into socially defined gender roles ... Krauss’ fiction is not speculative, not in the technical sense. But there is a wondrous playfulness at work that will appeal to fans of that genre ... What fascinates me is the granular texture of these stories, so full of divine detail that they unfold like the stuff of memoir. The centrifugal core of this collection is the author’s sensibility, the transcendent lucidity of her prose, and the exactness of her world-building. Her stories are anchored in a reality so densely and meticulously textured that they sometimes read like autobiographical fiction, even if the events described seem larger than life ... Each story offers Krauss’ unique lens, held up to situations that look ordinary at first glance ... a collection to get lost in. And when one emerges on the other side, the world still shimmers with possibility.
Though some stories seem worlds away, others hit uncomfortably close to home, as in Future Emergencies set shortly after 9/11 in a New York City where gas masks are distributed for free and the government warns of vague threats ... A few of the stories feel like excerpts of novels, which does leave you wanting—and occasionally needing—more information. (You won’t want to leave the subjects of Switzerland, about rebellious young women living in a finishing school slash rooming house in Geneva.) But overall, Krauss is incredibly adept at portraying novel-worthy characters in this much shorter form.
Krauss’ tales sometimes echo the fanciful-acerbic early work of Cynthia Ozick. She has a fine eye for conflicted identities and problematic legacies. She also has a knack for ending most of her stories on an oblique yet deeply satisfying note ... Switzerland, like the title story, is one of Krauss’ most recent efforts and suggests a new direction she may be taking, as it examines the influence that reckless and possibly damaged figures can exert over the impressionable souls around them ... The collection isn’t flawless. The editor in me itches to delete the overly explanatory final paragraph in The Husband when Krauss has the perfect understated closer in the lines just before it. Still, 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.
... gives you an around-the-world view of masculinity, both gentle and toxic ... Krauss is first and foremost a novelist who writes short stories as if they are scenes from a novel that she didn’t have the energy to finish. Like a series of one-act plays, we get the expurgated histories and concerns of a myriad of characters who are trying their hardest to define their experiences as men or with men in various times of life. Her keen eye for detail keeps us interested in the many different protagonists and the switch-ups between first-person and third-person narratives throughout the collection. Sexuality, religion and elaborate cultures give us the framework for these failing or ailing relationships. It is a compendium of insights that would feel at home in a poetry journal or a psychology newsletter ... Each of the stories feels like a civil war between rationality and emotionality ... Krauss’ poetic craft operates at such a high level that it keeps readers thinking about the last group of humans while moving gratefully into a new tale with hope that these people will fare better than the last ... Like a wonderful omnibus, the wide range of experiences and dramatic repartee in these stories offers a scintillating and emotionally intense read that won’t soon be forgotten.
What defines a life well-lived? What does it take for a chance encounter that turns into a friendship developed over the course of one summer to make its presence felt decades on? Krauss (Forest Dark, 2017) 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.
...triumphant ... Krauss’s style is marked by a willingness to digress into seemingly superfluous details, yet the minutiae helps the author conjure a series of realistic environments, allowing each story feel lived in. This is a spectacular book.
After publishing four novels to great acclaim, Nicole Krauss has come out with her first collection of short fiction, To Be a Man, and the results are decidedly mixed. Word for word, she writes beautiful sentences but sometimes the stories don’t add up to much. Or they devolve into dreamy self-absorption, mysticism and apocalyptic dread.
The latest 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 ... These stories are remarkable enough, but deep in the book, Krauss departs, ever so subtly, from a strict allegiance to realism ... At the forefront of each is the relationship between a couple. In the end, perhaps that’s what makes these tales so moving and so disconcerting ... A tremendous collection from an immensely talented writer.
