Before I donned the gentleman’s cloak, back when I was still a wayward scamp who held doors open for people with nary a bow or doffing of a top hat, I recommended the work of Nicole Krauss. “The History of Love” and “Great House” are recommended enthusiastically, but those recommendations have disappeared into the unending chasm of the internet, and while a government agency undoubtedly has copies on a floppy disk, I am unable to link you to those recommendations, and rather than use words to elaborate on those previous recommendations (when said words are clearly better spent doing whatever it is I’m doing now), I merely urge any reader with a taste for what folk call “literary fiction” to read those novels.
I also recommend Krauss’s most recent novel, “Forest Dark.” But I concede it may require a more voracious appetite for fanciness than her previous novels. “Forest Dark” alternates chapters between Epstein, a retired lawyer, freshly divorced, whose parents recently died and who has developed a condition his lawyer refers to as “radical charity,” and Nicole, an author wrestling writer’s block and a dying marriage. Epstein gives away expensive paintings and timepieces. Nicole fancies she has a double. They go, separately, to Israel. Epstein loses his coat and a cherished book in a coatroom switcheroo. Nicole is informed that Kafka faked his death and is asked to finish some of his unfinished work.
You’ll want to be cool with a writer writing about a writer who shares her name and her marital situation and who is prone to, in the Nicole chapters, launching into essays about the nature of reality or Kafka. Do paragraphs like these make your eyes roll?
…Just as plants need us to be drawn to their flowers so they can thrive and multiply, might not space also depend on us? We think we’ve conquered it with our houses and roads and cities, but what if we’re the ones who have unwittingly been made subordinate to space, to its elegant design to propagate itself infinitely through the dreams of finite beings? What if it isn’t we who move through space, but space that moves through us, spun on the loom of our minds? And if all of that is so, then where is this place from which we lie and dream? A holding tank in nonspace? Some dimension we’re unconscious of? Or is it somewhere in the one finite world from which billions of worlds have been, and will be, born, a single location different for each of us, equally banal as any other?
If so, still try “The History of Love.” If not, then prepare for a taste of Israel the likes of which you haven’t experienced unless you’ve been to Israel or read a really good book about Israel. If you like extra personal, beautiful, sad, strange stories without conventionally satisfying endings (and maybe are interested in watching a genius write her way through a few things), Krauss has whipped up a treat for you.
