A narrative as exquisite as it is erratic. A creativity only given to the mission of having something to tell in its purest version. There are writers made factories of fictions and narrators like Chris Kraus that only deliver their cadence of publications to that need to tell something. Once the argument and its scenario assaults with that power capable of stealing sleep.
Perhaps it is a matter of Kraus having other artistic aspects where he can focus all sorts of concerns without shields or censorship. But when Kraus begins to write, it seems that in part he stitches together all those unstitched lives in his short films to compose fascinating mosaics. He can break with historical fictions or with epistolary novels or simply with current novels that explore all kinds of limits and distortions between personal spheres and social coexistence.
Ultimately, the stories that Kraus offers us move away from any labeling and are projected towards that greater meaning that arises in the interaction between settings and characters. His dialogues or soliloquies, refined to filter drops of pure realism, end up giving us a degree of mimicry towards the most surprising development of events.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Chris Kraus
the scoundrel factory
It is not a question of presupposing that the scoundrels have already been judged in Nuremberg or in any other court in charge of outrages and war or dictatorial crimes. Seeking expiation of the human condition in a book like this can end up causing opposite effects. Because the sins and follies of the past still appear slightly buried, in a present specialist in express conscience laundering...
Along the lines of Las benevolas, of Jonathan Littel, The Scoundrel Factory is a novel that exceeds all limits, a magnificent historical and family fresco that portrays the darkest years of the 1974th century. In XNUMX, in a Bavarian hospital, Koja Solm, an old man with a bullet lodged in his head, decides to tell about his life to his roommate, a young hippie and pacifist. Through interlocking episodes, from Riga to Tel Aviv, via Auschwitz and Paris, The Rogue Factory takes us to areas where morality and integrity are violently outraged to tell us what it was like at the end of World War II.
I love dick
A jewel in the key of autobiographical fiction. A suggestive, pretentious, twisted and deranged as well as a brilliant story with the hint of an essay and a literary-lysergic journey about identity, creativity, myths, likes and dislikes and everything that moves us between contradictions and confusion towards any minimum sparkle of certainties.
When Chris Kraus meets Dick, a famous theorist of countercultural movements, she falls madly in love with him and her life is turned upside down. She, a frustrated artist on the verge of forty, falls into such a state of love frenzy that she decides to move away from a life in the shadow of her successful husband and pursue her dark object of desire throughout the United States, in a strange journey that leads her to question the foundations of her femininity.
But the love letters that the narrator writes compulsively will soon become an art form in and of itself, a medium that has almost nothing to do with Dick. In his first novel 'I Love Dick' – a great literary sensation in the year of its original publication, 1997, and widely considered the most important feminist novel of recent decades – Chris Kraus broke new ground by tearing apart the veils that separate fiction reality and blur the lines between narrative and essay. First published in Spanish by Alpha Decay in 2013 (and turned into a TV series in 2016), 'I Love Dick' remains essential reading, as indispensable, fierce and funny as ever, and which we now present in a new revised edition and accompanied by a suggestive prologue by Gabriela Wiener.
summer of hate
The poles attracted without possibility of amendment. Clarity and absolute darkness launched into an encounter at an intermediate point. Love and hate, dreams and nightmares. Perhaps it is not only part of the human condition to look at a desire and its opposite. Perhaps it is a matter of a cosmic balance that marks everything. An effect perfectly visualized in a story like this that starts from the anecdotal and the casual to assail us with much cooler doubts about our impulses from the purest desire towards self-destruction.
Haunted by the ghost of a sexual game she played with "her killer" (as she would later call Nicholas, a dominant looking for a slave whom she met through a BDSM dating website), Catt, art critic and teacher , alternates academic and cultural life with real estate deals in the Southwest of the United States, while trying to decipher where that death wish began that had taken her from fantasy to terror.
