“Switzerland”
by Nicole Krauss
from the September 21, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I‘m always happy to get something new from Nicole Krauss, and here we have a story about a thirteen-year-old girl American girl who goes to Switzerland to live in a boarding house (something Krauss did herself at that age). The narrator is looking back from her forties, and she begins the story by mentioning someone she first met in 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’d 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.
“Switzerland” is the first story in Krauss’s forthcoming collection To Be a Man. This is her debut collection, following four novels. I have a copy of that so I plan on reviewing more the stories in it, but it should be noted that, besides “Switzerland,” we have looked at a few other stories in it because they have been published in The New Yorker over the years: “Zusya on the Roof” and “Seeing Ershadi.” If you got The New Republic in 2013 you may have read “I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake.”
I hope everyone is starting out what will be a great September week. Please let me know your thoughts on “Switzerland” and Krauss’s work in general below!
This is quite a good story, almost as good as “Ershadi”. It has the same detailed, silky narration, but it’s not as wideranging. “Soraya” also has a theme in common with “Ershadi” — how difficult it is to interpret complex things. In “Ershadi” it was the movie, here it is a girl’s behavior. Both viewed through different lenses over a long time frame (in human terms).
Ill write more later, but here are a couple of thoughts, One minor, one major.
Minor: This story reminds me a lot of “The Story of O”.
Major: Krauss portrays female relationships toward men in a much more complex and nuanced way than, for instance, “Cat Person” or “The Resident Poet”. Soraya’s interactions with the Dutchman are more ambiguous, partly because they are seen through the eyes of a 3rd person (though told in the first person). Near the end of the story the focus shifts toward the narrator, then toward her daughter. Still, ambiguity persists. Much more worldly, I think, than the meme that has become prevalent in NYer stories in the past couple of years: men are bad and women are victims who need to be on guard against them.
More later.
2nd installment: The title made me think of Hemingway’s “Homage to Switzerland”. On reflection, I don’t see any relation. On the other hand, I don’t understand the Hemingway story, so I could be missing something.
3rd installment: good phrases or sentences, some of which are a kind of musing or seem like random observations, but aren’t really:
“flickering past in a mercurial chain of associations”
“That Switzerland . . . has the best institute for trauma in the world seems paradoxical. . . after so many centuries the Swiss just went about muffling themselves.”
“had to cross a field, which, by November, was covered in snow that the sheared brown stalks sworded through.”
“with its petty, hormonal girls, Olympic in their cruelty.”
“There was no attunement beween John Calvin and me . . .”
‘its “finishing” schools that polished the wild and dark out of girls’
4th installment: “meaning” sentences, which show us what she’s working with:
‘”I could break you in two with one hand.”’ repeated at the end; this is about girls’ vulnerability – which is everywhere in the world, even if they don’t seek it out. And which is the basis of her theme.
“And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core that had come to her, like all natural gifts, without effort, and what might happen if it failed her.”
(connects to above about muffling) “a country singularly obsessed with controlled reserve and conformity, with engineering watches, with the promptness of trains, would, it follows, have an advantage in the emergency of a body smashed to pieces.” But the girls are a contrast: “Wildness – sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply – was what had landed them both in Switzerland for an extra year of school.” Two opposites, like Calvin and Borges.
“From my walks alone in Geneva I already understood that the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability. But I wanted to believe that the balance of power could be tipped in one’s favor by strength or fearlessness or something I couldn’t name.” –that’s what her fascination with Soraya is about.
And it devolves onto her daughter: “It’s her curiosity about her own power, its reach and its limits that scares me.” Reflection of Soraya: “Though maybe the truth is that, when I am not afraid for her, I envy her.”
The bruise on her throat, the phone call, “the illusion of her autonomy” – narrator trying to form a calculus of what’s possible, how far a woman can go.
Soraya and balance of power with man: “And, as she listened, she knew something had been exposed that he had not wished to expose, and which shifted the balance between them.”
“I was close to something in her and close to something in myself that drew me and frightened me a little, as she had. She had gone further than anyone I knew in a game that was never only a game, that was about power and fear, about the refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into.”
“She left it to us to decide for ourselves what had happened to her, and in my mind I saw her in that moment when she’d touched my hair with a sad smile, and believed that what I’d seen was a kind of grace: the grace of having pushed oneself to the brink, of having confronted some darkness or fear and won.” But this is a guess, or wish, or projection.
5th (and last) installment: Who and what is the story about?
First, who: Narrator, Soraya, narrator’s daughter — all women who dare to be bold and brave.
Then, what? The story is about trying to understand, expressed so well in the last graf:
“Since then I have been haunted by her, and by how a person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself. Soraya with that deep laugh that came from her stomach, when she told us about the Dutch banker’s arousal. He could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken, or she wasn’t going to break.”
Also about how fearsome that process is. “I was afraid of myself: of what I might discover beneath my understanding.”
Two added bits:
One, we recently read another story in which a woman ran away – “The Other Woman”?
Two. This phrase — “when he had nothing to say about the sun he was raised under” – is a reference to Camus, I think.
The dialectic of power vs. vulnerability/powerlessness is inherent in perhaps all relationships but with male/female where physical strength factors in (hence “I could snap you in two”) there is another layer. The question is not answerable but certainly worth pondering and dramatizing either in Soraya’s tale or more directly the narrator’s experiences in Paris. Maybe at points the story veers more into “telling” than showing but it’s elegantly handled.
Thank you William & Ken for your excellent analysis. It’s always about power and control.
Male vs female power is not only a question of physical strength. It’s also a matter of a woman, Soraya, using her good looks, wealth, social status and intellect to manipulate and conquer the banker. Soraya is the matador who knows just how to control the bull with her cape, thus achieving a balance of power, which in the end is a game to her, a test of skills, nothing more. Both parties always know that he, the banker, can physically overtake her, young girl, anytime he wants, but if he breaks her in half, he would then eliminate his object of mental and physical pleasure, or end the game. All of her life, Soraya’s relationship with her dad, doting and controlling, has honed her skills in handling similar-type men. The banker, as depicted in the phone call with his wife, is susceptible to female manipulation. Soraya knows that.
Saroya does not *conquer* the banker. She conquers her own fear.