Man Walks Into a Room [Hardcover]

Nicole Krauss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2002

A man is found wandering the desert outside Las Vegas. The cards in his wallet identify him as Samson Greene, a Columbia University English professor last seen leaving campus eight days ago. Thirty-six years old, with a wife, Anna, and a dog, Frank. But Samson doesn’t even recognize his own name, and by the time Anna has made her away across the country to pick him up, doctors have discovered a cherry-sized tumor in his brain; its removal eradicates the last twenty-four years of Samson’s memories.

Samson and Anna return to New York together, where Samson struggles to connect with the woman he knows he is supposed to love, with his career, with his home, with his “life.” He remembers his mother, his childhood in California, the basic shape and processes of the world, but everything else remains blank. In the meantime, Anna sees the same husband she has always seen, but every day has to steel herself against the notion that the man she loves is the Samson who remembers the last quarter century, the Samson who has been shaped by the history of their lives together.

Into these daily lives fraught with a peculiarly intimate tension comes a charismatic scientist who invites Samson to take part in a groundbreaking, experimental project involving the transfer of memories from one mind to another–all it requires is a trip back to the Nevada desert. It doesn’t take much to lure Samson away from his profound loneliness in the City–where he is stuck between missing the past life that surrounds him and yearning to enjoy the fresh start he’s been given–though Anna is never far from his thoughts as he embarks on the adventure that could mean the end of the old Samson Greene.

In Samson, Nicole Krauss creates an ordinary man who his facing a searingly new world with gritty poignancy and purely instinctual empathy. Reminiscent of early DeLillo, but with the emotional sensitivity of a budding Cheever, Krauss’s sharp, intelligent storytelling effortlessly peels away the layers of quotidian circumstances to reveal the subtle joys and woes of simple survival.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nicole Krauss's elegant, haunting debut, Man Walks into a Room, is a what-if novel. What if, asks Krauss, a man woke up one day and he'd forgotten everything he knows? Samson Greene is found lost in the desert near Las Vegas, memory-less thanks to a tumor "applying its arbitrary, pernicious pressure to his brain." Once the tumor is removed, he can remember his childhood up until his 12th year, but then all is blank. He returns to New York, to his wife Anna, to his life as a Columbia University English professor, but none of these things makes sense to him anymore: "Samson could dredge up no feeling for his own life but that of vague admiration." When he receives a call from a mysterious scientist inviting him back to the desert for a sinister-sounding memory experiment, Samson heads West with a kind of despondent fatalism. Krauss's novel moves gracefully from exploration of a lost soul to science fiction to a meditation on memory. If the book unravels a bit at the end, it's only because Krauss is trying to do too much--certainly no literary sin. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

This elegiac first novel achieves a kind of beguiling dreamy tenderness as it tells the story of Samson Greene, a seemingly happy, well-adjusted English professor whose life is thrown wildly out of kilter by a small brain tumor. It is discovered only after he suddenly leaves home and is found wandering in the Nevada desert. Once the tumor is removed, he can remember nothing beyond the age of 12, so that his adult existence, his friends, his professional life and especially his wife, Anna, are a profound mystery to him. He and Anna try to resume their lives, but it is no good pretending that things can be as they were. Eventually Samson leaves again, this time for an experimental research station, also in the Western desert, where attempts are being made to graft the memories of one human into another's mind. Samson becomes friends with another resident at the station, an elderly eccentric called Donald, but when Donald's memories are grafted into Samson's mind, they are of a test nuclear explosion he witnessed as a young soldier. Adrift again, and even more disillusioned, Samson convinces himself he must find his medical records and also determine where his dead mother is buried; he succeeds in both endeavors, one with the aid of a drunken teenager in Las Vegas, the other with a senile uncle and achieves a kind of hard-won reconciliation to his lot. This outline of the story suggests a somber tale full of dark symbolism, but in fact it is surprisingly lighthearted, sharply observant and often touching. Krauss is a sure writer thoroughly in control of her material, and she creates, in Donald and Uncle Max, a pair of memorable characters. Only the ending, from the viewpoint of Anna, the lost wife, fails to bring quite the expected epiphany.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (May 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385503997
• ISBN-13: 978-0385503990
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #727,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nicole Krauss is the author of "Man Walks into a Room," "Great House," and the international bestseller "The History of Love." Her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A nice first effort, but Krauss is too present, May 1, 2004

By 

Whitney (Nashville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Man Walks Into a Room (Paperback)

After reading Nicole Krauss' "The Last Words on Earth" in the New Yorker, I went to my library to get this book. However, it was disappointing. The plot would have been better served by a lesser writer. In this book, Krauss jilts the intriguing plot line with strained metaphors and other poetic devices. Krauss' background as a student and poet are evident; the book seems written for the purpose of analysis rather than the pleasure of the narrative.

That is what separates this book from the greatness achieved by other postmodern authors--ex: DeLillo, Nabokov, Roth. Their plots may naturally suggest the same questions of authenticity and reality, and they may refuse the patent plot line (exposition, rising action, conflict, resolution), they may even write self-consciously, breaking the plane between writer and audience. But, unlike Krauss in this effort, they have achieved those objectives without forcing the reader into that dialogue. In particular, Krauss' pretentious (or idealistic, arguably) poetic tendencies are always nagging at the reader, at times driving him away from plot to make note of the language. Language must serve a writer like a waiter at a fine restaurant--always filling your glass, but doing so without instrusion. Krauss' language is more like the waitress at T.G.I. Friday's: too much flair.

"The Last Words on Earth" (you can find it by googling Krauss and the title; it's available on a New Yorker archived page), is nothing short of breathtaking. Krauss has the reader running after the plot, caught between the enjoyment of what one is reading at the time and the anticipation of what the next sentence brings, and flipping forward to ensure that the story, the pleasure, will not end too quickly. It is elegant, rather than ostentatious. It is at once a love story accessible to all as well as a text with unanswerable questions about meaning and identity. It can make you weep out of its dizzying emotional impact. It will keep you up at night, returning to its pages, dreaming of how anyone--anyone--could write that well. Her character development is superb. And she chooses the mundane yet the extraordinary. She excels. I imagine that perhaps--like most poets--she designed to restrain herself and then write one of the great pieces of short fiction I've ever read. And she did it without an eye on what might later be said about it analysis in journals and conversations in coffee shops and book clubs. And that's what makes it worth discussing. I wait with great anticipation for Krauss' future works.

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Home is where the Heart is, July 24, 2002

By 

MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Man Walks Into a Room (Hardcover)

Nicole Krauss' "Man Walks Into A Room" is a story of longing. Longing for our youth and for the time when our Mothers were very important to us...really the center of our world. It is also about memory and how our memories shape our lives and what happens when we are without a big chunk of them.
Samson Greene, a married college professor 36 years old and living in NYC, is found wandering in the desert outside of Las Vegas. He is disoriented, doesn't know who he is or from whence he came. In the hospital he is found to have a brain tumor, which, after removal, leaves him without 24 years of his memories. His wife Anna rushes to his side of course, but he does not recognize her: "He could not absorb everything she was trying to tell him. When she told him that his mother had died he felt it like the clean break of a bone and a sound came from him that he did not recognize. When he was too exhausted to weep any more he lay in silence, all his being drained to the flat line of the heart stilled."
Anna takes Samson home to New York and they try to reconvene their marriage but it is not easy: "You don't know. You don't know! She (Anna) shouted...I still love you. I've lost you and yet you're still here. To taunt me..."
Krauss or Samson really, refers back again and again throughout the novel to the loss of his mother: "It was as if he had been sleeping when she died, or worse laughing his head off at a party. It had always been the two of them; it was as if he had closed his eyes and then, when he opened them, he was old and she was gone." Samson later, towards the end of the novel, as a way of explaining his being found in the desert outside Las Vegas, feels that he was trying to find his way home from New York to California much like the Swallows find their way home to Capistrano every year...not just out of tradition and custom but because it was only at home and with his Mother that he really felt safe and secure.
Krauss' style is gorgeous, succinct and intelligent throughout but it is especially effective during Samson's reveries about his Mother, as in this quote about what she taught him about loss: "To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been."
So much of contemporary fiction and film seems centered around the notion of recapturing a lost childhood or reconstructing an idealized family life that may or may not have existed; be it "The Road to Perdition" or Nicole Stansbury's "Places to look for a Mother." Add "Man Walks Into A Room" to that list.
Nicole Krauss has done an outstanding job of creating a world gone awry and inhabiting it with characters of substance and interest. I look forward to her second novel with anticipation.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reflective and Poignant, May 26, 2005

By 

Matt P. (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Man Walks Into a Room (Hardcover)

I think the strength of this novel lies in the idea of a man moving on in his life, despite the fact that his past has been wiped out. Krauss puts us into Samson's mind and makes us wonder how we would act/think if we were in his situation. The parts of the book that ring true are the concepts of one vision lasting in memory above all others, and the constant struggle of Samson wondering what kind of man he had been before his loss. This is a deep and reflective novel, not unlike something we would see from an earlier Delillo. The plot takes twists and creates a surreal desert setting through much of the story, but in the end the characters are believable and the issues of loss and longing make it an accessible novel.