Tides of Treacle 
James Wood
Last year, when the young writer Nicole Krauss published an extract from her second novel in the New Yorker, I took delighted note. The voice of her elderly narrator was both familiar and strange enough to be captivating. Leopold Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish immigrant from Poland, told us about his solitary, death-haunted life in Manhattan. He tries to be seen by someone at least once every day (‘All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen’); he and his upstairs neighbour, Bruno, communicate by banging on their radiator pipes; he carries with him a card that reads: ‘MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.’
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
The Lie-World · D.B.C. Pierre
The Slightest Sardine · a literary dragnet
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
At the tent flap sin crouches · The Fleshpots of Egypt
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
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