This book ranks in my list of favorite books of all time. The story is about a young man, Samson Greene, who seems to have everything -- a beautiful wife, a professorship at Columbia University, a home in NYC, good friends... a near-perfect life. But a strange tumor on his brain causes him to lose his memory -- all except the first 12 of his life. So the book starts with him wandering the desert near Las Vegas, mistaken for a homeless man, discovered by the police. His wife is called and by that time, Samson is just recovering in the hospital, still unknown whether he will survive. Starting from this crescendo, the story changes pace, elaborating on Samson's journey in Self-Discovery. The story has other plots, but I think I appreciated the themes exploring memory/mind/concept of Self: how much of a person's identity is related to their past experiences? Are past memories traps -- is a person more free if they relinquish their past life? How do the memories of others shape our own minds?Within this personal story, there's a broader theme. Samson becomes part of an experiment that studies empathy. Ray, the scientist, uses Samson's memory-void mind to plant a powerful memory from someone else's life. Even though this seems an important cause -- making it possible for others to fee empathy, from the perspective of Samson, we feel more the violation and frustration of having the mind played with. This introduces the theme of how medical science may be helping others for a greater good, while potentially hurting and harming one vulnerable individual deeply as the guinea pig. What I found especially artful was that by this point in the story, I felt more sympathy for Samson's wife, Anna, than I did for him. It seemed that with his memory, he lost some ability to empathize, making his decisions rather selfishly and almost mechanically. It was surprising how this experiment affected him, like a personal assault. I think he was almost chosen for the experiment because of his aloofness, yet his reaction was passionate.Also, I LOVED the ending. It is tempting to have everything neatly tied up at the end, but... the author rather chooses to end describing a simple, everyday scene in the future. Things are not resolved, but mirroring life, slowly being worked out... with hope, but perhaps some baggage too. The language is Nicole Krauss poetry. I love how she is able to show, almost visually describe a scene, how the characters feel and think. Her description of what it means to be a lover, or how hurtful it is to have your mind violated... these are so beautiful and the reason I look forward to more books by this author! I am adding some of my favorite excerpts here: "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so you had the advantage of leaning and looking up?" (page 140)"What Ray had refused to see was that no matter how great the desire to be understood, the mind cannot abide any presence but its own. To enter another's consciousness and stake a flag there was to break the law of absolute solitude on which that consciousness depends. It was to threaten, and perhaps irrevocably damage, the essential remoteness of the Self. this transgression was unforgivable." (page 206)"Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future." (page 208)"What is life without a witness?" (page 209)
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.
What do You think about Man Walks Into A Room (2003)?
I had to wait a couple days before I tried to write a review for this one. Sometimes I find it really difficult to explain why I loved something so much. Nicole Krauss has been one of my absolute favorite authors since I first read The History of Love. I quickly thereafter picked up Great House and then just sort of put her on hold for a while I suppose, because I knew she didn't have any new work out and for whatever reason didn't come back to this one, her first novel. I'm wondering if I couldn't find it at my library and maybe that's why I waited so long to read it. Anyway, I shouldn't have. Samson is found walking in the Mojave Desert and he doesn't know who he is. He barely looks like the photo on his driver's license, and the police take him into custody in order to figure out who this person is. They soon discover that he is, indeed, the man on the license and he's been walking from New York. He doesn't remember anything from the past twenty-four years. What follows is an incredibly inventive, deep, and insightful story. I found Samson to not be all that sympathetic, really. I identified more with his wife, Anna, and wondered about all the things she must be thinking and feeling. She just lost her husband for goodness' sake, and it must be impossible for both of them. Krauss' writing is like no other (except her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer :P ). I hadn't read a well-written book in way too long, as reading this made me realize I'm a little starved for good, insightful literature. I so wish and hope she writes again soon.
—Allie Chickie
The book starts off very promising. A man loses 24 years of his memory due to a brain tumor. As the book says, we’re nothing but a collection of habits and accumulation of memories. If we lose those memories and habits, we lose our self and start over with a blank slate. That should make a good concept for a very interesting novel. Instead, the story meanders through a series of irrelevant events and characters and doesn’t offer much in the end.From the few places where Krauss discusses things like memory and vision and brain, I could tell that she’d read Oliver Sacks and his case studies of neurological patients as part of her research for writing this novel. Disappointingly, and even with the free reign of imagination that she had as a fiction writer, she couldn't make the story to be as fascinating as Sacks’s real case studies.
—Jafar
Gripping. Touching. Thought provoking.What if you wake up one day with no memories of the years that have passed? Will you embrace the emptiness, start anew or go searching for answers of those echoes of the past that have shaped you to who you are at the present? Will you hold on to the people around you, who remember you as you have been, or cut them from your life, turn over a new leaf?Krauss, a very talented writer, capable of stirring into her readers such thoughts and lead them into introspection through the voice of her creations, has once again managed to paint such a vivid scenery of a man struggling with losing his memories. He has lost everything, except his mind. Samson, a professor with a brilliant mind, a husband to a devoted wife, recovers from a brain surgery with no memories of the past 24 years, not recognizing his wife, his own life a stranger to him and yet managed to retain his highly functioning mind.The book is narrated through the eyes of this man, how he struggled to not reclaim who he was, but better understand who he is now. In this self exploration, he isolates himself, meets new people, and finds meaning.It's a painful journey, as the reader sympathizes with the wife. At the end of the book, I can't help thinking that how the novel would have been more beautiful, if the story was told on both perspectives (Not to say that the book was anything less but).Regardless, I loved the novel as it is. I liked Samson. Loved Anna. I wished for a longer ending, fast forward into the farther future.Let me just quote one of my favorite lines from the book:“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.”
—Grace Viray
