Man Walks Into a Room
by Nicole Krauss
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nicole KraussEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-11-11
ISBN: 0385721919
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Man Walks Into a Room
Book Review: A History of Loss
Summary: 5 Stars
The concept of this brilliant first novel by Nicole Krauss is simple. A man is found wandering in the desert in Nevada. Documents in his billfold show him to be Samson Greene, a thirtyish English professor at Columbia, but a medical examination reveals a devastating brain tumor. His wife Anna comes to be with him for the operation that saves his life but also robs him of all memories past the age of 12. Although he does not recognize her, Samson goes back to New York with Anna, grateful for her loving care. But his memories do not return. More than that, Samson comes to treasure the 24-year blank as a kind of mental refuge. He moves out on his own and eventually volunteers for a program back in Nevada that experiments with transferring memories from one person to another. The results shock him into a state of almost total disorientation, but he painfully begins to discover how to live his life anew.
I cannot but compare this to Richard Powers' recent novel THE ECHO MAKER, also about a man recovering his memory after brain trauma. Although Krauss is the less realistic writer (some of this taut novel seems a little too artfully constructed), she is also simpler, more empathetic, and infinitely more resonant. Indeed, I am amazed at the number of issues she can raise through her central examination of the nature of loss.
The back cover describes Samson as "an emigrant in his own life." Although Krauss herself does not use this term, there is an obvious parallel between Samson's condition and that of any emigrant who has left his previous life behind to start again in a new country -- the defining fact of the American experience (and certainly of mine). Krauss is Jewish, and although the theme is barely touched on in this novel, there are nonetheless echoes of that extreme case of loss caused by the Holocaust, and thus a link to her second book, THE HISTORY OF LOVE, which is one of the most beautiful post-Holocaust novels in recent years, and which shares with this one the belief that some kind of regeneration is possible, even from the most arid desert.
The book is also a parable of the writing process itself. Ray, the scientist who enrolls Samson as an experimental subject, is fascinated by his desire to preserve a mental tabula rasa. But "once you have given up everything," he asks, "don't you have to set down the first mark?" So it is for the creative artist. Samson has found himself essentially a white canvas, a blank sheet of paper. Making the first mark of a new life is a terrifying experience. In the most difficult part of the book, after he has left the experimental facility, we see him wildly constructing almost melodramatic fictions, imagining a fantastic back-story for a boy he meets in Las Vegas, identifying with an ex-hippie returned from India to join a fundamentalist cult. But these are temporary aberrations. The raw material of who he is (the raw material of all writing) has been accessible to him all along, in the memories of his childhood. In search of that past, he visits an great-uncle who has lost his own memory through senility, but who nonetheless is able to offer Samson an epiphany that will prove the turning point.
Finally, this is a love story, though an oblique one. Even when Samson and Anna separate, there is no doubt that love still remains part of the equation. And in Samson's various intergenerational encounters with oddball characters along his way (either young enough to be his students, or almost surrogate parents), there is always the undertow of attraction or affection. But love is also the other side of the coin to loneliness, and its desperate antidote. Perhaps the greatest lesson that Samson learns is the place of loneliness in his life. Curiously, by coming to embrace it, he also arrives at a resolution in the last few pages of the book which, although unexpected and certainly oblique, is also strangely consoling.
Summary of Man Walks Into a Room
A luminous and unforgettable first novel by an astonishing new voice in fiction, hailed by Esquire magazine as ?one of America?s best young writers.?Samson Greene, a young and popular professor at Columbia, is found wandering in the Nevada desert. When his wife, Anna, comes to bring him home, she finds a man who remembers nothing, not even his own name. The removal of a small brain tumor saves his life, but his memories beyond the age of twelve are permanently lost.
Here is the story of a keenly intelligent, sensitive man returned to a life in which everything is strange and new. An emigrant from his own life, set free from all that once defined him, Samson Greene believes he has nothing left to lose. So, when a charismatic scientist asks him to participate in a bold experiment, he agrees. Launched into a turbulent journey that takes him to the furthest extremes of solitude and intimacy, what he gains is nothing short of the revelation of what it means to be human.
Nicole Krauss's elegant, haunting debut, Man Walks into a Room, is a what-if novel. What if, asks Krauss, a man woke up one day and he'd forgotten everything he knows? Samson Greene is found lost in the desert near Las Vegas, memory-less thanks to a tumor "applying its arbitrary, pernicious pressure to his brain." Once the tumor is removed, he can remember his childhood up until his 12th year, but then all is blank. He returns to New York, to his wife Anna, to his life as a Columbia University English professor, but none of these things makes sense to him anymore: "Samson could dredge up no feeling for his own life but that of vague admiration." When he receives a call from a mysterious scientist inviting him back to the desert for a sinister-sounding memory experiment, Samson heads West with a kind of despondent fatalism. Krauss's novel moves gracefully from exploration of a lost soul to science fiction to a meditation on memory. If the book unravels a bit at the end, it's only because Krauss is trying to do too much--certainly no literary sin. --Claire Dederer
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