54 The New York Review
the man exists at all and isn’t rather the
hallucination he ultimately seems to
be. Here and in other stories, as often
in her novels, Krauss likes to blur the
line between real and unreal. Encoun-
ters with mysterious or otherworldly
characters, implausible events, parallel
worlds, and striking coincidences bring
to mind the fictions of writers like Paul
Auster and Haruki Murakami, as does
the sense of dreamlike disorientation
and dislocation often experienced by
a confessional narrator. What the man
ends up doing is obsessing, unnerving,
and exhausting the woman, until she at
last recognizes him as the obstacle and
burden that she knows will be with her
for “a very long time.”In two stories, cinema has an import-
ant part. The narrator of “Seeing Er-
shadi,” a professional dancer, watches
Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta s te of C h er r y
and is enthralled by the face of an actor
named Homayoun Ershadi at the pre-
cise moment when it conveys a man
“pushed to the brink of hopelessness.”
Later, on a trip to Kyoto, she glimpses
a man she believes is Ershadi: same
face, same expression. If it seems far-
fetched that any of this could spark the
kind of profound, compassionate love
the woman claims she now feels for the
actor, an even more improbable devel-
opment occurs when an actress who is
a friend of hers declares, “The exact
same thing happened to me.” After
listening to the actress’s Ershadi story,
the narrator finds herself questioning
not only the meaning of her own en-
counter with the actor but her dedica-
tion to her artistic vocation as well.
“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. One day she explains to an old
friend (the narrator) how it was seeing
one particular film, in which an elderly
man devotes himself to the care of his
invalided wife, that opened her eyes to
what was lacking in her own beloved fi-
ancé, thus impelling her to leave him.
(Though it is never stated, the film is
Michael Haneke’s Amour.)
What puzzled me about “Amour”
was the setting: “one of the refugee
camps.” How this woman and the nar-
rator have come to be behind barbed
wire and what turned these ordinary,
privileged Americans—and apparently
many of their fellow citizens—into
refugees is never explained beyond a
vague mention of “myriad collapses
and disintegrations.” 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.
I had a similar problem reading “Fu-
ture Emergencies,” which begins with
authorities’ informing New Yorkers that
everyone will shortly be needing a gas
mask but without specifying the impend-ing danger. People respond by picking up
masks at distribution centers and getting
on with their lives. (How likely is that?)
The main story here centers on a tour
guide at the Metropolitan Museum who
has been living for several years with an
older Frenchman who was once her pro-
fessor, and now finds herself struggling
with a question familiar enough to peo -
ple in romantic relationships: Should I
stay or should I go? Again, this couple’s
story might just as well have been told
without the business of the gas masks
or the tease of the reason for them.
(“The whole thing had been some
sort of test,” we are eventually told.)
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 read-
er’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 ques-
tion mark: Was it because the writer
lacked confidence that the relationship
story she wanted to tell was interesting
enough in itself that she felt the need
for some sensational context?
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. “It’s
her curiosity in her own power, its reach
and its limit, that frightens me,” a mother
tells us, in “Switzerland,” observing her
twelve- year- old’s response to the way
strange men look at her—and having
just related a frightening story about
where such boldness had led a sexually
precocious schoolgirl she once knew.
In “End Days,” a California high
school senior must come to terms with
her parents’ decision that twenty- five
years of marriage are enough. Amica-
ble for husband and wife, the divorce
afflicts their daughter with “what she
knew would long remain, might always
remain, a disorder in her heart.” Her
inner tumult is intensified by her own
recent breakup with a boyfriend and by
the desperate battle raging outdoors to
beat back encroaching wildfires.
Tasked with delivering paperwork to
the rabbi who had performed the cer-
emony for her parents’ get, she finds
herself alone with a different rabbi,
his young assistant. As they chat, she
catches him looking at her bare legs,
“and the knowledge that such naked-
ness had never before been glimpsed in
that kitchen gave her a sudden sense of
power.” What she does with that power
brings to a culmination this beautifully
evolving story with its novel’s worth of
insight about love, family, and desire
and an ending that one could not have
foreseen but that feels completely in-
evitable. Unlike so often elsewhere in
Krauss’s fiction, at no point in the nar-
rative 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 ca-
pable writer can make out of ordinary
people, dear ordinary people living
their sweet messy everyday lives. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.“David Bromwich—one of the few great
public intellectuals in our time—has given
us a feast of wise and courageous essays by
exemplary writers of the highest order! His
elegant and eloquent introduction sets the
stage for a caravan of profound reflections so
timely for our historical moment of escalating
moral decay, political corruption and
massive arbitrary power.” —Cornel WestIn Writing Politics, intellectual historian and liter-
ary critic David Bromwich presents twenty-seven
essays by different writers from the beginning
of the modern political world in the seventeenth
century until recent times.They are essays that grapple with issues that
continue to shape history—revolution and war,
racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker,
the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence
and nonviolence, among them—and essays that
have also been chosen as superlative examples
of the power of written English to reshape our
thoughts and the world.
Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David
Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George
Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia
Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt
are here, among others, along with a wide-rang-
ing introduction.
“Penetrating essays across three centuries con-
sider freedom, power, and justice.... Overall, the
sophistication of language and argument through-
out this anthology testifies to what public dis-
course used to sound like before it became
dominated by Twitter rants. Well-chosen, endur-
ingly relevant selections.” —Kirkus ReviewsAvailable from booksellers or nyrb.comWRITING POLITICS
AN ANTHOLOGY
Edited and with an introduction by
David Bromwich
Paperback • 512 pages • $22.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale October 20th“David Bromwich has chosen essays
in which famed dissenters, critics, and
reformers courageously address their
fellow citizens, reframing a shared world
and its political demands. They offer an
unparalleled education in how to think
and act politically.” —Karuna MantenaBLACKBALLED
THE BLACK VOTE
AND US DEMOCRACY
With a new essayDarryl Pinckney
Paperback • $14.95
Also available as an e-book
“Recommended for political junkies and
those seeking a quick study to gain a
basic understanding of the importance
of voting rights for African Americans.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“A capacious and mind-opening
experience awaits within.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[Pinckney’s] fusion of the personal and
the political makes him a peerless
witness and participant, and lends his
voice a weight and force that never
comes at the expense of style or grace.”
—Damian Van Denburgh, SFGateNOW IN PAPERBACK AND WITH A NEW ESSAY
“As young Americans take to the streets to say
Black lives matter, they’re often told to vote.
While voting is important, it’s also important to
remember how black political representation has
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ing and felon disenfranchisement. Blackballed
addresses the struggle for voting rights and
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Pinckney’s own experiences and writings of civil
rights leaders to create a complicated picture
of black political identity.” —Isabella Rosario,
NPR’s Code Switch
“Part memoir, part historical reflection, all polit-
ical: there’s something for everyone.” —Katherine
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Read,” Real Simple
“This brief but incisive reflection on the history of
voting among African-Americans takes the form
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dering style that ends up revealing more than a
frontal attack might have.” —The New Yorker
“Blackballed is timely and essential. Recent police
killings of Black boys and men have once again
pushed race to the forefront of public aware-
ness, and Darryl Pinckney’s slender volume asks
that we pause and look deeper—into the past,
into the current state of our democracy and into
‘what Black means now.’” —Patricia Sullivan,
The Washington Post
“... offers a brisk history of black voting rights.
It covers a lot of ground, surveying the trajectory
of the civil-rights movement, musing on the in-
fluence of social media in the 2012 election
and describing the Supreme Court’s 2013
decision overturning a key section of the Voting
Rights Act.” —Ari Berman, The NationAvailable from booksellers or nyrb.com