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A review by gh7
Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss
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.