"Torpor" follows Jerome Shafir, a literature professor at Columbia, his wife, Sylvie Green, a writer and filmmaker with an inconclusive career, and their dog Lily through rustbelt New York City, Paris, Berlin, and the Eastern Bloc at the dawn of the New World Order.As much a shattering portrait of a Holocaust survivor as portrait of a marriage, "Torpor" is also the portrait of a lady rarely found in literature