Set in the early 1990s, Torpor follows Sylvie Green and Jerome Shafir, an intellectually entangled, increasingly exhausted couple travelling through post-communist Eastern Europe in pursuit of an adoption that might rescue their marriage. 

Sylvie and Jerome can interpret fascism, Bataille, Jewish exile and the collapse of communism, yet remain almost magnificently incapable of understanding what is happening between them. The historical material is not backdrop: Europe’s damaged inheritance becomes entangled with infertility, thwarted ambition, dependency and the couple’s desire to turn suffering into something meaningful.

More distanced than the first-person machinery of I Love Dick, Torpor uses third person to become, perversely, more exposed. Kraus turns its protagonists into grotesque, tender intellectual clowns without withdrawing sympathy from them. It is perhaps her saddest novel, but also among her funniest: a book about political torpor, marital torpor and the deadness produced when people can explain almost everything except their own lives.

Semiotext(e) Native Agents paperback, 2015 new edition. Light rubbing and edgewear; clean interior.