Review: To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss (Harper, 2020)

While, as its title hints, To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss is concerned with masculinity, it renders a variety of characters—heroic and otherwise. Throughout this collection of short stories, Krauss weaves present-time situations in America and Tel Aviv with emotional, ancestral echoes of destruction and deep, unburied grief. The past continues to propel characters as they 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 and dialogue that excavate nuances of common humanity.

The unnamed, first-person narrator of "Switzerland" recalls a year spent at an international school where she witnessed rebellion and sex vicariously, through escapades of her friends Marie and Soraya. The story is structured as a time capsule, a snow globe of memories shaken up decades later after the narrator has grown up and become a nostalgic, conflicted mother wondering how to protect her adolescent daughter.

The book's high-tensile narratives consistently twist moments of fate. What are people compelled to do in these moments? What actually happens? These are questions for God, or writers like Krauss, who task contemporary characters with universal dilemmas. Read my full review here.