BASS 2021: Nicole Krauss, “Switzerland” from The New Yorker, 9/21/20

I was interested in trying to capture the way a young woman tests her strength and will against the realities of her life: among them, that she is physically vulnerable to men, that to comply with the expectations of others requires containing herself or making herself small, that her sexuality comes with inherent dangers. The Dutch banker doesn’t lead or determine this story – on the contrary, the story centers on Soraya’s struggle with her sense of her own power, and he, at least as he is seen by the narrator, is only an accessory to that. He is merely the arena in which her performance of self plays out.

Nicole Krauss, Contributor Note

Of all the things that interest me about this story, that central focus is the one that interests me the least. Go figure.

We have a younger (thirteen years old) narrator observing the behavior of an older (eighteen) classmate at a Swiss post-finishing school. That, by the way, is one of the things that interests me more than Soraya’s dangerous waltz with the Swiss banker, as our narrator recounts what had landed Marie and Soraya, the two older girls in Ecolint:

Wildness – sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply – was what had landed them both in Switzerland for an extra year of school, a thirteenth year that neither of them had ever heard of….
He yanked her out of Thailand and deposited her in Switzerland, known for its “finishing” schools that polished the wild and the dark out of girls and contained them into well-mannered women. Ecolint was not such a school, but Marie, it turned out, was already too old for a proper finishing school. She was, in the estimation of those schools, already finished. And not in the good way.

I seldom find myself wanting to edit a published piece (good thing, since I  have no training for it) but I had remembered this paragraph about being “finished” without that final line “And not in the good way” and was shocked to find it there in print. Leaving the reader to discern the two meanings of “finished” – first, to polish and perfect, and second, to be doomed – would have been a better approach, allowing us to admire Krauss for knowing how to use the idiom. Adding the final line merely trumpets, “Hey, did you see what I did there?” or assumes the reader isn’t bright enough to get it on her own. Strange that a six-word sentence can affect me so negatively, but I see it as a huge mistake.

I also wonder what the thirteen-year-old narrator is doing in that school, since she is nowhere near finished, in any sense.

But the story Krauss is interested in telling revolves around Soraya, who plays her sexuality against the depravity of the unnamed Dutch banker. There are numerous signs that she is losing – a bruise on her throat, following his orders about phone calls – but she persists. When she disappears for several days, it becomes a more serious matter; parents and police are called in. “In the end Soraya came home on her own. On her own – just as she had gotten into it on her own, of her own choosing.” When people talk about choices, it’s often as if those choices come from an infinite palette, whereas in reality, most of the choices people make are between a few options, some of which may be worse than the ultimate decision. Soraya’s father was royal engineer to the Shah of Iran, and had to flee during the revolution, “making a mockery of the physics of safety.” Do you suppose this might have had some impact on what Soraya perceived as her choices?

The story is written as a recollection years later, when the narrator recognizes something of Soraya in her now twelve-year-old daughter:

She has a proudness about her that refuses to grow small, but if it were only that I might not have begun to fear for her. It’s her curiosity about her own power, its reach and its limits, that scares me. Though maybe the truth is that when I am not afraid for her, I envy her. One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man in the business suit who stood across the subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge. If she’d been riding with a friend, she might have turned her face slowly toward her, without taking her eyes off the man, and said something to invoke laughter. It was then that Soraya came back to me, and since then I have been what I can only call haunted by her. 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.

The terror I might feel as a mother, seeing this in my child, knowing what it could lead to, seems to be absent from the narration. I understand the envy, but not the cool detachment. I suppose there’s a fear so deep it stays curled up inside, and to let it out would help nothing.

I’m also interested in how Krauss phrases the writer’s choice to make the Dutch banker “the arena in which” Soraya conducts herself, making her the agent and him the environment. I’d like to understand that better: how it’s enacted on the page, what a different approach would look like. I’m guessing his relative unimportance is why he isn’t named.

Ward includes this story with her “youth” group, highlighting “the ways they coped or didn’t cope.” I found it  a dramatic contrast with the prior story, “The Rest of Us,” which I characterized as “hot”. This story feels “cool” to me. I’m sure the narrator, worried about her twelve-year-old feeling a little too secure about her control of situations by use of sexuality, does not feel cool, but that’s how the story struck me. Possibly it was just an association with Switzerland, but I think it’s more the distance, the reserve, of the narrator.

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• Jake Weber sees a similarity to Emma Cline’s Los Angeles from a couple of years ago, and enjoys the “symbolic grist” in this story “about the treacherous balance between tenderness and violence.”