Customer Reviews

Man Walks Into a Room

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

First let me say that I think this novel had a great deal of potential and the prologue is fantastic -- tight construction, vivid language, and living images. From here things get very murky indeed. The plotline is sloppy, gimmicky, and meandering, and at times the writing is annoyingly self-conscious. Characters are not well developed -- this may be the "point" but they drift in and out of the pages uttering wise speeches and then vanish into obscurity or dissolve into vagueness. I was overall left with a very vague impression of the main characters and cared little about Samson's plight as it seemed devised only for the purpose of proving some kind of point (which is never clear and lost in the muddy middle) about modernity and memory loss.

Krauss's "Man Walks Into a Room" is an elegantly told story about Samson Greene, a man loses decades of memory as a result of the removal of a brain tumor. Sadly, it is not only memories that Samson loses. Krauss explores the vast web of confusion and alienation Samson experiences with his wife, a woman whom he no longer knows or understands. A professor at Columbia, Samson has no recollection of his work there or his connection to the university. With seemingly little to lose, Samson goes to the middle of a Nevada desert to conduct vague, futurist brain research except Samson himself is the object of the research. After an extanglement with the doctor-researcher, Krauss shifts gears sending Samson to soul searching travels, looking for his lost uncle and eventually his mother. The novel does unravel some toward the end, and it is clear that Krauss had difficulty with the ending. In all fairness, this is a first novel, and one that raises some important questions about identity, how much of our sanity relates to other people, and the importance of family. In all, Krauss writes a strong novel which provokes much reflection. Recommended.

The concept of this brilliant first novel by Nicole Krauss is simple. A man is found wandering in the desert in Nevada. Documents in his billfold show him to be Samson Greene, a thirtyish English professor at Columbia, but a medical examination reveals a devastating brain tumor. His wife Anna comes to be with him for the operation that saves his life but also robs him of all memories past the age of 12. Although he does not recognize her, Samson goes back to New York with Anna, grateful for her loving care. But his memories do not return. More than that, Samson comes to treasure the 24-year blank as a kind of mental refuge. He moves out on his own and eventually volunteers for a program back in Nevada that experiments with transferring memories from one person to another. The results shock him into a state of almost total disorientation, but he painfully begins to discover how to live his life anew.

I cannot but compare this to Richard Powers' recent novel THE ECHO MAKER, also about a man recovering his memory after brain trauma. Although Krauss is the less realistic writer (some of this taut novel seems a little too artfully constructed), she is also simpler, more empathetic, and infinitely more resonant. Indeed, I am amazed at the number of issues she can raise through her central examination of the nature of loss.

The back cover describes Samson as "an emigrant in his own life." Although Krauss herself does not use this term, there is an obvious parallel between Samson's condition and that of any emigrant who has left his previous life behind to start again in a new country -- the defining fact of the American experience (and certainly of mine). Krauss is Jewish, and although the theme is barely touched on in this novel, there are nonetheless echoes of that extreme case of loss caused by the Holocaust, and thus a link to her second book, THE HISTORY OF LOVE, which is one of the most beautiful post-Holocaust novels in recent years, and which shares with this one the belief that some kind of regeneration is possible, even from the most arid desert.

The book is also a parable of the writing process itself. Ray, the scientist who enrolls Samson as an experimental subject, is fascinated by his desire to preserve a mental tabula rasa. But "once you have given up everything," he asks, "don't you have to set down the first mark?" So it is for the creative artist. Samson has found himself essentially a white canvas, a blank sheet of paper. Making the first mark of a new life is a terrifying experience. In the most difficult part of the book, after he has left the experimental facility, we see him wildly constructing almost melodramatic fictions, imagining a fantastic back-story for a boy he meets in Las Vegas, identifying with an ex-hippie returned from India to join a fundamentalist cult. But these are temporary aberrations. The raw material of who he is (the raw material of all writing) has been accessible to him all along, in the memories of his childhood. In search of that past, he visits an great-uncle who has lost his own memory through senility, but who nonetheless is able to offer Samson an epiphany that will prove the turning point.

Finally, this is a love story, though an oblique one. Even when Samson and Anna separate, there is no doubt that love still remains part of the equation. And in Samson's various intergenerational encounters with oddball characters along his way (either young enough to be his students, or almost surrogate parents), there is always the undertow of attraction or affection. But love is also the other side of the coin to loneliness, and its desperate antidote. Perhaps the greatest lesson that Samson learns is the place of loneliness in his life. Curiously, by coming to embrace it, he also arrives at a resolution in the last few pages of the book which, although unexpected and certainly oblique, is also strangely consoling.

This book is about a man whose brain tumour removal causes him to lose his memory from age 12 onwards. If you leave aside the fact that he's still able to create new memories and is perfectly mentally and physically fine otherwise, I still found it unconvincing. Not only can he understand vocabulary and concepts that he must have learned post adolescence, he seems perfectly well able to function in a world as a 36 year old despite that huge blank space. Sure he has some relationship and career issues, but how does he even understand even a fraction of the conversations he engages in? Given this, the experiment he goes through in the second half of the book seems more than plausible, likely even.

That said, there is some lovely writing throughout, and although it was a bit repetitive and melodramatic, the philosophy and psychology discussed throughout is interesting (and the reason I picked it up in the first place). The ending gets a bit sloppy and over the top, but then again, Vegas does that to you.

I read Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love" first and became an instant fan. She has a brilliant mind and a unique ability at transcribing her creativity like no other author I know. Her writing is intellectually engaging and highly addictive. That said, I thought "Man Walks Into a Room" was an excellent book but having read her second novel first, I simply couldnt give this one 5-stars.

It was not difficult to sympathize with Samson Greene; a man with a rich life suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor that results in the loss of 26 years of his life worth in memories, so that all he remembers are his childhood years up to the age of 12. To think about the number of memories one accumulates in just one day, that is a tremendous loss. To not be able to remember someone you loved, certain nuances about that person, certain nuances about yourself (!!)...it's extremely sad. I actually found Samson's ability to easily turn his back on all that more depressing than the medical trauma he was dealt. How could someone feel so little responsibility towards the people in his life. To voluntarily choose to let your personality - the person you were - just fade into oblivion like you never existed...

I expected the book to carry more emotion towards the people in his 'real' or current life than it did. The story centered on a scientific experiment Samson got reeled into while it could have taken a completely different turn, choosing instead to contrast and compare the person, husband, friend he becomes at age 30-something vs. the one he was. I would have preferred that Krauss build on the hopefulness and the chance he was given at starting over (that many of us have wished for) than to plunge into the deep abyss of loneliness and carelessness that Samson displayed. I enjoyed the more emotional encounters between him and his wife, the memories he had of his mother and his tragic re-learning of her death which literally brought him to his knees. To have to relive such personal loss after a life-altering medical tragedy is just too much for anyone to handle. Yet Samson's reflections on his life and his pontificating over how he would have acted in certain circumstances naturally encourages us to build that image of him: someone who was well accomplished, bright, caring, sensitive, playful...but the truth is we dont know that any of it is true, although we desperately want to believe it. Anna, his wife, shares so little that we are left wondering who this man really is. The last few chapters were wonderful because it felt like he was beginning to appreciate the importance of his relationships, although incredibly melancholic and filled with a heart-wrenching dose of loneliness.

In the last two pages you hear from Anna and while your mind had cast her as the victim all along, you learn that she too is responsible for the choices Samson made. Still, we are assured of the indeliable love between the two...in fact, it has probably grown deeper although it is a less romantic love. There is a mutual respect between them and Anna's hesitance to share even her greatest memory with Samson verifies her lack of desire to go back to what once was.

I honestly cant wait for Krauss' next book...I just hope it contains more hopefulness and less sadness like her second novel did. For those who havent yet read "The History of Love", I recommend you read this one first...let her writing dazzle you, and then be blown away by her literary genius in "The History of Love".

They were both very moving and full of emotion. They were both about memory and loneliness. They both had messy plots full of loose ends. And they both teetered on the verge of sentimentality. I think The History of Love is more accomplished because its characters were more fleshed out. The main characters in Man Walks into a Room, Samson and Anna, were hollow. The most vivid character in the book I thought was Lana, who turned out to be a dead end. Also, I thought the plot needed to be stronger, more believable, and more organic. Both Man Walks into a Room and History of Love were deeply flawed, but still managed to be very enjoyable and engrossing. Krauss is young and has tremendous talent and potential and I'm sure will grow into an even better writer than she is already.

This IS NOT science fiction meets literature...

Its literature, deep and reflective at times, meets exploration of one to find meaning in a new/blank slate life self with a weak scientific plot to compliment that. The plot shows promise in the beginning, the dialogue and introspection are well-written, but the story ends up fizzling out.