I read this book eagerly and with absorption; my reactions ranged from admiration to love. All the same, I could easily describe it in such a way that no one would buy it: a first-person narrative by an author unable to overcome her writer's block, interleaved with the story of a wealthy lawyer who gradually withdraws from normal life. The two stories are not even connected, for heaven's sake! In the hands of a lesser writer, this could spell disaster. But Krauss is not a lesser writer; she remains her magnificent self. I found this one of the most stimulating new novels I have read since, well, Krauss's own GREAT HOUSE. I'll try to explain why.
It's a small point, but I enjoyed the setting. The one time I worked in Israel, I stayed in the next hotel down the beach from the block-like Tel Aviv Hilton, which plays a significant part in both stories (a connection of a kind, I suppose). I have visited the hill town of Safed (S'fat), cradle of Jewish mysticism. I have at least seen the Dead Sea and the Negev Desert. But even without those personal associations, I would have appreciated Krauss's knack of finding a special place to enclose a special purpose. Her Israel, without ever being touristic, is as real as her New York City, especially in terms of the reality of the minor characters who inhabit each locale.
As with minor characters, so with major ones. When I finished the first chapter, about the disappearance of the billionaire Jules Epstein, I posted a reading-progress note calling this a masterpiece. To be honest, I never experienced quite this high again, but there was nothing to contradict it either; the initial charge remained in place until the end. This chapter is one of the best pieces of character exposition I have ever read. Not just because Krauss so beautifully establishes the facts about Epstein, his former marriage, his family, his fabulous purchases on the art market and subsequent sales, but because she takes us deep into his mind and, more importantly, his soul.
For that is the distinguishing feature of this, more than any of the other three Krauss novels that I have read. All the characters are defined by their spiritual concerns. Of course, these are specifically Jewish concerns, expressed in terms of rabbinic philosophy, and I am not a Jew. But this doesn't matter, for the questions she raises about existence are questions that belong to all of us, whatever our religious or philosophical context. One of Krauss's strengths is that she so often poses her questions through lively anecdotes, like the one told by Israeli rabbi who gate-crashes a dinner held by New York Jewish leaders to open a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas. Another strength is that she never quite answers them, but leaves the questions to resonate with both the characters and the reader.
The title comes from Dante's Inferno, which in the Longfellow translation begins like this:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Krauss will have literal forests later on in the novel, but at the beginning they are mostly a metaphor for some of the big questions that she poses: Why are we here and what have we lost? What is our responsibility to life? What is the purpose of religion? Her thinking is not always easy to follow, but it impresses me nonetheless:
Just as religion evolved as a way to contemplate and live
before the unknowable, so now we have converted to the
opposite practice, to which we are no less devoted: the
practice of knowing everything, and believing that knowledge
is concrete, and always arrived at through the faculties of
the intellect. […] The more [Descartes] talks about
following a straight line out of the forest, the more
appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest, where
we once lived in wonder, and understood it to be a
prerequisite for an authentic awareness of being and the world.
Krauss avoids the easy answers and tidy endings, as I said, but the novel has an impressive consistency, and the forest darkness does not last for ever. Here is Epstein checking into a run-down studio apartment on the waterfront in Jaffa:
Epstein, new again to everything -- new to the blazing white
light off the waves, to the crying of the muezzin at dawn, new
to the loss of appetite, to the body lightening, to a release
from order, to the departing shore of the rational, new again
to miracles, to poetry -- took an apartment where he would
never have lived in a thousand years, had he been living a
thousand years, which, new again most of all to himself, he
might have been.
Finally, I come to that elephant in the room: the potential dead weight of a self-obsessed writer gazing into her navel instead of just telling a story. Yes, I recognize this, and there were times when my patience wore thin, for example when she has people claim that her novels belong to world Jewish literature rather than the unnamed author herself. But there was also a striking personal honesty here, as she examines her ten-year marriage and its imminent collapse. In these sections, Nicole Krauss is not the sage philosopher cloaking herself in big ideas, but a hurting woman puzzled at how the great love between her and her husband could have turned to cold politeness. The theme of emptiness and separation comes up again and again, and always it is painful -- but she discovers that it is not always negative. As the gate-crashing rabbi tells Epstein:
God created Eve out of Adam's rib. Why? Because first an empty
space needed to be made in Adam to make room for the experience
of another. Did you know that the meaning of Chava -- Eve, in
Hebrew -- is 'experience'?
There is a chapter called "Lech lecha," which are the Hebrew words in which God commands Abram to go to the land of Canaan and become the founder of the Jewish people:
But Lech lecha was never really about moving from the land of his
birth over the river to the unknown land of Canaan. To read it
like that is to miss the point, I think, since what God was
demanding was so much harder, was very nearly impossible: for
Abram to go out of himself so that he might make space for what
God intended him to be.
When one knows that Krauss in fact separated from her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, shortly before writing this novel, and later began a relationship with an Israeli writer, suddenly all this Biblical exegesis becomes very personal indeed.
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Loveday Book Review/joshualoveday.blog
Loveday Book Review: FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss joshualoveday.blog The title of Nicole Krauss’s latest novel FOREST DARK, as the author notes at the end of the book, comes from Dante: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. The story has two parallel plots that explore interconnected themes. One concerns the character Nicole’s efforts to find inspiration to write a novel. To say that the character of Nicole is midway in life’s journey and having a midlife crisis oversimplifies this complex novel and its interwoven themes. Krauss doesn’t leave much doubt that the character of Nicole in the book is her—or rather her version of herself that occupies a speculative reality. Krauss’s marriage to novelist Jonathan Safron Foer ended in 2014, and it is hard to wonder how much of this book was being written while her marriage failed. The second plot involves Epstein, an elderly Jewish philanthropist in the process of giving away all his earthly possessions, the final act of which is to plant trees to create a forest in Israel for future generations to enjoy—his own FOREST DARK. In the process, he meets a mystic rabbi, the founder of a religious community called Gilgul—a Hebrew word meaning “cycle” or “wheel” that describes the Kabbalistic concept of reincarnation or transformation. After almost drowning in the Mediterranean, mirroring a line from a book his daughter Maya had given him—“The soul is the sea that we swim in”—Epstein begins his own process of transformation, drowning in his soul and ultimately disappearing into the desert like one of the prophets of old. After travelling to Israel on a pilgrimage of sorts to the Tel Aviv Hilton—a monolith on the shore of the Mediterranean that is so central to the protagonists’ identities that it almost becomes another of the novel’s characters—Nicole meets a retired scholar named Friedman, who may or may not exist. He claims Franz Kafka never died in Europe of tuberculosis in 1924 but retired to Israel in anonymity where he produced more works that were never published. Friedman implores Nicole to translate and publish Kafka’s lost works, eventually sending her to a shack in the desert that supposedly belonged to the Czech author. Krauss explores Kafka’s relationship with his Jewish identity, noting that “In Hebrew, the translation of The Metamorphosis is Ha Gilgul.” This metamorphosis mirrors both Epstein’s and Nicole’s transformations as the novel progresses. Nicole as a first-person narrator is unreliable, and her entire plot line exists only in the imagination of another Nicole. Krauss writes: “. . . when I came through the door of the house I shared with my husband and our two children . . . I sensed that I was already there.” From this point on we read a story not grounded in reality. It is the author Krauss projecting herself into an alternate timeline within the novel where she explores reality as a result of the self-creation of one’s own personal narrative. She later extrapolates this concept to the state of Israel itself, noting a narrative is created by a mind warding off formlessness, a sense of something or someone (a person, a people) giving themselves a name, a mythos, a story so they can prove to themselves and the world that they exist. This mirrors the history of the Jewish people when they enshrined themselves in their biblical tales, giving themselves a form, a history that is no less real than the unwritten and forgotten history of other cultures, but remembered and passed on to the rest of humanity. Nowhere in the book is the alternate reality of Nicole as an unreliable narrator more obvious than at the end of the novel when she is in the hospital after leaving Kafka’s isolated refuge in the desert and remembering something that happened in the future: “With the orderly’s cool hand on my forehead, I recalled an afternoon the following winter when my lover arrived home and entered the bedroom carrying his bag.” The last line of the novel brings Nicole’s fanciful reality full circle, back to where she started: “And for a while I didn’t see myself either, sitting in a chair in the corner, already there.” FOREST DARK is one of those novels that leaves one needing to read it again, if only to reconcile the complex yet interrelated themes that run through it. Krauss’s writing style is blunt, almost in-your-face, but her insights into the nature of human perception and motivation—or lack of—display a unique vision. I’m not going to say her work is Kafkaesque, as that word is so overused that its meaning can be misconstrued, but Krauss’s accomplishment might have pleased Kafka. I enjoyed this literary achievement—Krauss’s fourth novel and arguably her best—especially the second time I read it. Read more reviews at joshualoveday.blog.
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2018
Loveday Book Review: FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss
Loveday Book Review/joshualoveday.blog
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2018
joshualoveday.blog
The title of Nicole Krauss’s latest novel FOREST DARK, as the author notes at the end of the book, comes from Dante:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
The story has two parallel plots that explore interconnected themes. One concerns the character Nicole’s efforts to find inspiration to write a novel. To say that the character of Nicole is midway in life’s journey and having a midlife crisis oversimplifies this complex novel and its interwoven themes. Krauss doesn’t leave much doubt that the character of Nicole in the book is her—or rather her version of herself that occupies a speculative reality. Krauss’s marriage to novelist Jonathan Safron Foer ended in 2014, and it is hard to wonder how much of this book was being written while her marriage failed.
The second plot involves Epstein, an elderly Jewish philanthropist in the process of giving away all his earthly possessions, the final act of which is to plant trees to create a forest in Israel for future generations to enjoy—his own FOREST DARK. In the process, he meets a mystic rabbi, the founder of a religious community called Gilgul—a Hebrew word meaning “cycle” or “wheel” that describes the Kabbalistic concept of reincarnation or transformation. After almost drowning in the Mediterranean, mirroring a line from a book his daughter Maya had given him—“The soul is the sea that we swim in”—Epstein begins his own process of transformation, drowning in his soul and ultimately disappearing into the desert like one of the prophets of old.
After travelling to Israel on a pilgrimage of sorts to the Tel Aviv Hilton—a monolith on the shore of the Mediterranean that is so central to the protagonists’ identities that it almost becomes another of the novel’s characters—Nicole meets a retired scholar named Friedman, who may or may not exist. He claims Franz Kafka never died in Europe of tuberculosis in 1924 but retired to Israel in anonymity where he produced more works that were never published. Friedman implores Nicole to translate and publish Kafka’s lost works, eventually sending her to a shack in the desert that supposedly belonged to the Czech author. Krauss explores Kafka’s relationship with his Jewish identity, noting that “In Hebrew, the translation of The Metamorphosis is Ha Gilgul.” This metamorphosis mirrors both Epstein’s and Nicole’s transformations as the novel progresses.
Nicole as a first-person narrator is unreliable, and her entire plot line exists only in the imagination of another Nicole. Krauss writes: “. . . when I came through the door of the house I shared with my husband and our two children . . . I sensed that I was already there.” From this point on we read a story not grounded in reality. It is the author Krauss projecting herself into an alternate timeline within the novel where she explores reality as a result of the self-creation of one’s own personal narrative. She later extrapolates this concept to the state of Israel itself, noting a narrative is created by a mind warding off formlessness, a sense of something or someone (a person, a people) giving themselves a name, a mythos, a story so they can prove to themselves and the world that they exist. This mirrors the history of the Jewish people when they enshrined themselves in their biblical tales, giving themselves a form, a history that is no less real than the unwritten and forgotten history of other cultures, but remembered and passed on to the rest of humanity.
Nowhere in the book is the alternate reality of Nicole as an unreliable narrator more obvious than at the end of the novel when she is in the hospital after leaving Kafka’s isolated refuge in the desert and remembering something that happened in the future: “With the orderly’s cool hand on my forehead, I recalled an afternoon the following winter when my lover arrived home and entered the bedroom carrying his bag.” The last line of the novel brings Nicole’s fanciful reality full circle, back to where she started: “And for a while I didn’t see myself either, sitting in a chair in the corner, already there.”
FOREST DARK is one of those novels that leaves one needing to read it again, if only to reconcile the complex yet interrelated themes that run through it. Krauss’s writing style is blunt, almost in-your-face, but her insights into the nature of human perception and motivation—or lack of—display a unique vision. I’m not going to say her work is Kafkaesque, as that word is so overused that its meaning can be misconstrued, but Krauss’s accomplishment might have pleased Kafka. I enjoyed this literary achievement—Krauss’s fourth novel and arguably her best—especially the second time I read it. Read more reviews at joshualoveday.blog.
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