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A review by lalalena
Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss
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)