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miss_tsundoku's review against another edition
3.5
The story is OK, the writing style is remarkable. For that I give 3.5/5 stars.
looptieloo's review
2.0
I have to say that I was deeply disappointed in this book. I read her second novel "The History of Love" first. I am a huge fan of Jonathan Safran Foer and when I heard that this was his wife I wanted to become a fan of hers also. The History of Love was fabulous... one of my favorite books. This one, on the other hand, was boring boring boring... all of the beautiful writing from The History of Love is missing here. Extreme disappointment. However, if you like The History of Love I would recommend Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. It seems his writing style has influenced Nicole Krauss by the time her second novel came around because they seem similar, to me.
muffmacguff's review
4.0
I enjoyed this book and thought the story was interesting but I'm not certain I understood the book's themes. I want to think about this one for a bit.
mamajen321's review
2.0
Eh. Krauss's writing style is unique and eloquent. Unfortunately, the story was weak and kind of boring. I felt little connection to the characters, little interest in the outcome. I was bored.
I guess that's what I get for having read her second book first (The History of Love - amazing!).
I guess that's what I get for having read her second book first (The History of Love - amazing!).
artisticauthor's review
4.0
It's impossible to be disappointed by a Nicole Krauss novel. The premise was absolutely rivetting, the plot development was at a perfect and natural pace, I loved it. The loose ending was also something I really enjoyed. So often, Western literature proudly proclaims the neat package of "The Happy Ending" but Krauss does not abide by it. Would I consider the ending happy? Absolutely. Everyone finds their way to comfort and joy in the end, even if it's not exactly how we hoped or imagined. Krauss has been one of my favourite authors for one very simple truth: she never tells a story that doesn't feel real. The awkwardness, the discomfort, the sadness, the wrong place wrong time scenarios, the romance, the kindness of strangers. All of it is something that feels so raw and authentic to the world I live in. I learnt a lot about myself from reading this and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to slow down and self reflet. But prepare to be a little sad along the way.
lalalena's review
4.0
The problem with this book is that everyone is comparing it to The History of Love and I'm not sure that it's fair to do so. For the record, The History of Love is probably my favorite book, I wept my way through it, I was so moved that I sometimes had to spontaneously read aloud from it to whomever was nearby. It is a novel that is so wide in scope and so beautifully expressed that it might end up being Krauss' ultimate handicap.
Which leads me to Man Walks into a Room. I received this as a gift because of my said love for Krauss' second novel, and read it nearly a year after I read The History of Love. This is her debut novel and by all accounts, a beautiful one. Now, I didn't feel as emotionally wrenched (which probably a good thing) as I did while reading her second novel, but that doesn't mean this is a BAD book.
I think there are three main problems for the people who picked this up because they adored The History of Love. The first is that they picked up the superior second book of Krauss' first. It seems to me that the second book is superior because it's the healthy (and incredible) progression of a very gifted writer. The second (which I've seen in a few comments) is that some people read this immediately after The History of Love. The heartbreak that they experienced the first time around has become a sort of addiction and they want Krauss to deliver it again, just as piercingly. But she can't possibly deliver to those readers that are working backwards and from an emotional wreckage. The biggest problem is probably that the main characters, the ones we are to pity in this novel, are fairly young, intelligent, beautiful. In The History of Love, we are immersed in our sympathy for the old, lonely, and heartbreakingly pathetic Leo Gursky and the skinny, lonely, adolescent Alma and her younger and sadder brother, Bird.
All in all, read the damn book, but don't start it right after you put down The History of Love. And, if you don't believe me, here's a bit about Samson wondering why he wandered off to the desert once he had forgot himself: "Very likely he had arrived by accident, but if so, when the last stand of houses fell away and he found himself in such an expanse of emptiness, it must have relieved him to drift in a landscape that did not aggravate his mind but surpassed it in oblivion. He might have gone weak with gratitude to at last meet the scorched face of his own mind." (p 122)
Which leads me to Man Walks into a Room. I received this as a gift because of my said love for Krauss' second novel, and read it nearly a year after I read The History of Love. This is her debut novel and by all accounts, a beautiful one. Now, I didn't feel as emotionally wrenched (which probably a good thing) as I did while reading her second novel, but that doesn't mean this is a BAD book.
I think there are three main problems for the people who picked this up because they adored The History of Love. The first is that they picked up the superior second book of Krauss' first. It seems to me that the second book is superior because it's the healthy (and incredible) progression of a very gifted writer. The second (which I've seen in a few comments) is that some people read this immediately after The History of Love. The heartbreak that they experienced the first time around has become a sort of addiction and they want Krauss to deliver it again, just as piercingly. But she can't possibly deliver to those readers that are working backwards and from an emotional wreckage. The biggest problem is probably that the main characters, the ones we are to pity in this novel, are fairly young, intelligent, beautiful. In The History of Love, we are immersed in our sympathy for the old, lonely, and heartbreakingly pathetic Leo Gursky and the skinny, lonely, adolescent Alma and her younger and sadder brother, Bird.
All in all, read the damn book, but don't start it right after you put down The History of Love. And, if you don't believe me, here's a bit about Samson wondering why he wandered off to the desert once he had forgot himself: "Very likely he had arrived by accident, but if so, when the last stand of houses fell away and he found himself in such an expanse of emptiness, it must have relieved him to drift in a landscape that did not aggravate his mind but surpassed it in oblivion. He might have gone weak with gratitude to at last meet the scorched face of his own mind." (p 122)
gh7's review
3.0
Samson Greene, an English professor at Columbia, is found wandering alone in Nevada desert. Turns out he has suffered severe memory loss because of a brain tumour. He can remember nothing but his childhood. After an operation he returns to his wife who is a complete stranger to him. Soon he finds he can relate much better to one of his former young female students as if without memory of experience, experience is utterly erased and he is again a boy attracted, not to women, but to girls. This return of immaturity is also evidenced later in his need to find a father figure and to create a temporary but intense bond with a boy half his age. There’s a sense here that Krauss is having some fun with male menopause, that Samson’s memory loss is, on one level, a metaphor for the male mid-life crisis – another condition that perhaps obliterates memory and returns a male to his reckless boyhood yearnings.
Samson eventually leaves his wife when he falls under the influence of a neurosurgeon, Dr Ray Malcolm who Samson feels understands him. Samson returns to the Nevada desert where Ray is carrying out ground-breaking memory transference experiments. Thus Samson has implanted into his mind the memory of someone else – the harrowing recollection of a 1957 A-bomb test in Nevada. This is probably the least successful part of the novel, a kind of B movie foray into science fiction. Why anyone would choose to transplant a horrific memory from one consciousness to another is neither addressed nor credible. Having an unrecognisable hostile voice in your head amounts basically to schizophrenia and it makes no sense why anyone could conceive of the transference of such a memory as a healing procedure. It’s sinister for sinister’s sake.
It’s very ambitious for a debut novel and not always successful. Brilliant sections are followed by rather less brilliant ones. And as I said the memory transference section comes across as thematically gimmicky. Also the huge influence Delillo had on Krauss is laid bare in this novel - the desert setting, the bomb tests, the alienated existential angst-ridden central male character, the stylised dialogue – all these elements could be outtakes from Underworld. There are also echoes of Wenders’ film Paris Texas.
But it does have a lot to say about the relationship of identity and memory – most eloquently when Samson visits his uncle Max who has dementia. Samson, who still has his childhood, possesses all the necessary building blocks to achieve identity and fulfil himself; Max however has been stripped of all but his outlines and is little more than what Krauss refers to as weather. In many ways Krauss’s vision of identity is not dissimilar to Woolf’s in The Waves when the matrix of identity is established in childhood and adulthood is largely the gradual unfurling of shoots from this matrix. Samson has lost his strength but in Krauss’ vision it’s well within the bounds of possibility that he can regain it.
One of my favourite and very central passages: “To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then 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.
Samson eventually leaves his wife when he falls under the influence of a neurosurgeon, Dr Ray Malcolm who Samson feels understands him. Samson returns to the Nevada desert where Ray is carrying out ground-breaking memory transference experiments. Thus Samson has implanted into his mind the memory of someone else – the harrowing recollection of a 1957 A-bomb test in Nevada. This is probably the least successful part of the novel, a kind of B movie foray into science fiction. Why anyone would choose to transplant a horrific memory from one consciousness to another is neither addressed nor credible. Having an unrecognisable hostile voice in your head amounts basically to schizophrenia and it makes no sense why anyone could conceive of the transference of such a memory as a healing procedure. It’s sinister for sinister’s sake.
It’s very ambitious for a debut novel and not always successful. Brilliant sections are followed by rather less brilliant ones. And as I said the memory transference section comes across as thematically gimmicky. Also the huge influence Delillo had on Krauss is laid bare in this novel - the desert setting, the bomb tests, the alienated existential angst-ridden central male character, the stylised dialogue – all these elements could be outtakes from Underworld. There are also echoes of Wenders’ film Paris Texas.
But it does have a lot to say about the relationship of identity and memory – most eloquently when Samson visits his uncle Max who has dementia. Samson, who still has his childhood, possesses all the necessary building blocks to achieve identity and fulfil himself; Max however has been stripped of all but his outlines and is little more than what Krauss refers to as weather. In many ways Krauss’s vision of identity is not dissimilar to Woolf’s in The Waves when the matrix of identity is established in childhood and adulthood is largely the gradual unfurling of shoots from this matrix. Samson has lost his strength but in Krauss’ vision it’s well within the bounds of possibility that he can regain it.
One of my favourite and very central passages: “To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then 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.
blackoxford's review
4.0
Painful Memories
Man loses memory entirely: nothing to write about; man loses all but the last ten minutes of memory: almost nothing to write about; man loses 24 years of memory from the age of twelve: an interesting premise for literary investigation, particularly about the relationship between memory and feeling. How much is feeling invested memory? What happens to feeling when memory disappears? What happens to memory when it becomes more concentrated in some personal epoch? Krauss's explorations are sensitive and perceptive. They are also highly emotional. The last two pages will make you gasp...unless of course you have already lost too many memories.
For a much fuller appreciation 0f this book both in terms of its content and its contextual import, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1904505901
Man loses memory entirely: nothing to write about; man loses all but the last ten minutes of memory: almost nothing to write about; man loses 24 years of memory from the age of twelve: an interesting premise for literary investigation, particularly about the relationship between memory and feeling. How much is feeling invested memory? What happens to feeling when memory disappears? What happens to memory when it becomes more concentrated in some personal epoch? Krauss's explorations are sensitive and perceptive. They are also highly emotional. The last two pages will make you gasp...unless of course you have already lost too many memories.
For a much fuller appreciation 0f this book both in terms of its content and its contextual import, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1904505901
guybrush_creepwood's review
3.0
The premise of this book pulled me in immediately. The protagonist is found wandering in the desert with his memory of the past 24 years of his life obliterated by a brain tumor, including his ten year relationship with his wife. Instead of wanting to regain everything he's lost, as those around him expect, Samson feels alienated from the person he once was. His former life feels uncomfortable and distasteful to him, like wearing a stranger's dirty clothes. Shedding his unknown past, Samson returns to the desert at the behest of a charismatic doctor to participate in an experimental procedure. A veteran's nightmarish memory of an atomic bomb test is implanted into his brain. The doctor is convinced that the only way to feel true empathy for others is to experience exactly the same thing they did via a collective memory. But this idea put in practice has unexpected and destructive consequences.
Despite this fascinating concept, the plot seems to plod along. Not a whole lot happens. And since Samson is a stranger to himself, the character development is lacking. This is a novel about ideas and feelings, not plot or character. These ideas and feelings affected me, but the action of the novel seems at times as aimless as Samson's wanderings through the desert.
Although it was a little hard to get through, the book left a lasting impression on me. It provides more questions than answers. Can identity exist in a vacuum, in the present moment, devoid of the past to give it weight and meaning?
My favorite part of the novel was the epilogue, told from the perspective of Samson's estranged wife. It gives us our only glimpse of Samson's adult life prior to this event. Unlike Samson, Anna is burdened with the whole weight of their shared past. Her fear, love, longing, and loss are laid bare in these few sparse pages. It is achingly sad and beautiful and made me glad I stuck it out till the end.
Despite this fascinating concept, the plot seems to plod along. Not a whole lot happens. And since Samson is a stranger to himself, the character development is lacking. This is a novel about ideas and feelings, not plot or character. These ideas and feelings affected me, but the action of the novel seems at times as aimless as Samson's wanderings through the desert.
Although it was a little hard to get through, the book left a lasting impression on me. It provides more questions than answers. Can identity exist in a vacuum, in the present moment, devoid of the past to give it weight and meaning?
My favorite part of the novel was the epilogue, told from the perspective of Samson's estranged wife. It gives us our only glimpse of Samson's adult life prior to this event. Unlike Samson, Anna is burdened with the whole weight of their shared past. Her fear, love, longing, and loss are laid bare in these few sparse pages. It is achingly sad and beautiful and made me glad I stuck it out till the end.
johndomc's review
4.0
Beautiful and full of life. Memories of Samson's childhood, seen underwater.
I thought Krauss's writing really fine. Flipping through pages at random:
A garden party of the adults: "The sound of the afternoon passing slowly, according to a design beyond his grasp."
Occasionally surreal: "Then he turned and made off down the hall before Samson could club him with the jawbone of a donkey."
Painterly: "The sun dipped behind a cloud and the old man’s ears dimmed and went out."
I thought Krauss's writing really fine. Flipping through pages at random:
A garden party of the adults: "The sound of the afternoon passing slowly, according to a design beyond his grasp."
Occasionally surreal: "Then he turned and made off down the hall before Samson could club him with the jawbone of a donkey."
Painterly: "The sun dipped behind a cloud and the old man’s ears dimmed and went out."