A review by katieparker
Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

1.0

This book is about a man named Samson Greene, who is found in the middle of the Nevada desert without any idea of who he is. Doctors at the hospital he is taken to find a tumor in his brain and remove it, but even then he doesn’t fully recover. He regains his memories up to age 12, but the subsequent 24 years are a complete blank. He can’t remember his wife, what he did for a job, or the fact that his mother is dead. And so it goes, with him adapting to his new condition and deciding which life he wants: the one from his past, or the one in the present.

I chose to read this book specifically because it was short (I was a couple days behind my 52 books in 52 weeks timeline) and had been on my reading list for a few years. It was for these reasons that I didn’t expect it to take me two weeks to finish, but that’s what happened. There’s just not much to say about it except that I never got into the story, and I found the narrative to be extremely bland and generic. That’s not to say it’s devoid of plot, but it was far less engaging than I expected, and I was completely distracted by the never-ending analogies used to communicate what Samson was experiencing. (The word “like” appears more than 300 times in the book’s 230 pages, and while I’m sure not all of these are used in similes, I think it’s safe to say that most of them are.) I was disappointed to not like this book, since I thought The History of Love was pretty good, but it seemed amateurish and repetitive to me, and that’s that.