To be a man by Nicole Krauss

https://open.spotify.com/show/1iQin0Opq35T4QzlAqiYiB

To Be a Man is a collection of ten unusual, emotional and beautifully written short stories about the paradoxes of what is to be a man and what is to be a woman between men. 

They are stories about existence and relationships, about the gravity and depth of feelings that could only come of an intimate knowledge of what it is to be pushed to the brink of hopelessness. Nicole Krauss allows her characters to surprise you. Sometimes they show a terrifying vulnerability, and by creating a sort of intimacy, the reader cannot but feel a connection with them and an enormous amount of compassion about them.

Krauss situates the characters between places - Switzerland and Israel, Japan and South America. Their roots are sown in two different places, so they can never grow deeply enough in either. That is something that resonates strongly with me. I ‘ve always had trouble with the notion of home, as a place of stillness and of belonging. Like the characters in the book, I feel like living in a threshold, trying to find a balance between the stability of the familiar and of belonging and the instability of the unknown, of freedom, of becoming. It’s a continuous conflict; something that many of us are negotiating during our lives, how much we want to belong and to be routed, and how much we relish a life of new experiences and yearn for freedom and independence.

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