From Nicole Krauss, the award-winning, New York Times–bestselling author of The History of Love, an achingly beautiful novel about personal transformation that interweaves two stories: that of an older lawyer who disappears in the Israeli desert after abandoning his family and fortune, and that of a younger woman, a novelist, whose own quest takes her out of her conventional domestic life in New York and into the same Israeli desert.
Jules Epstein, a man whose drive, avidity and outsized personality have, for sixty-eight years, been a force to be reckoned with, is undergoing a metamorphosis. In the wake of his parents’ deaths, his divorce from his wife of more than thirty years and his retirement from the legal firm where he was a partner, he’s felt an irresistible need to give away his possessions—his money, his art collection, even his wristwatch—alarming his children and perplexing the executor of his estate. With the last of his wealth, he travels from New York to Israel, checking in at the Tel Aviv Hilton with a nebulous plan to do something in memory of his parents. His turn inward is briefly thwarted when he is sidetracked by a charismatic American rabbi, Menachem Klausner, who is planning a reunion for the descendants of King David and insists that Epstein is part of this storied dynastic line. Though dubious of Klausner’s motives, Epstein finds himself drawn to the rabbi’s sharp intellect and mystical ideas, and eventually gets involved in Klausner’s real passion: a film about the life of David being shot in the desert.
But Epstein isn’t the only one who checks into the Tel Aviv Hilton and begins a metaphysical journey that dissolves the sense of self, place, and history. In a parallel narrative told in alternating chapters, a young, well-known novelist leaves behind her two children and husband in Brooklyn and arrives at the Tel Aviv Hilton where she has stayed every year since she was born. Suffering from writer’s block and a marriage on the rocks, she at first believes that the hotel might be the key to unlocking a dimension of reality—and her own perception of life—that has been closed off to her. But when she meets a retired professor of literature, Geizi Friedman, who proposes a project she can’t turn down—the task of completing an unfinished script by her beloved Franz Kafka—and who reveals Kafka’s surprising and unexpected connection to Israel, she’s drawn into a mystery that alters her life in ways she could never have imagined.
Bursting with life, humour and passion, this is a profound, mesmerizing and very original novel that allows its protagonists to break through convention to find that spark of originality that is theirs alone.
Author Info
Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Forest Dark, Great House, The History of Love, and Man Walks Into a Room. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews
“Masterful . . . Beguiling, brilliant.” — Stephen Finucan, Toronto Star
“Forest Dark had me from the start . . . . The writing Krauss engages in deliberately straddles the frontiers of resonant fiction and recognizable self. It offers a vast space in which one can lose oneself, but it also supplies some level of closure to bring us back.” — José Teodoro, The Globe and Mail
“A brilliant novel. I am full of admiration.” — Philip Roth
“Entrancing and mysterious . . . Krauss reflects with singing emotion and sagacity on Jewish history; war; the ancient, plundered forests of the Middle East; and the paradoxes of being. A resounding look at the enigmas of the self and the persistence of the past.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Wildly imaginative, darkly humorous and deeply personal, this novel seems to question the very nature of time and space. Krauss commands our attention, and serious readers will applaud.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Forest Dark finds Krauss at the top of her game. It is blazingly intelligent, elegantly written and a remarkable achievement.” — Emily St. John Mandel, The Guardian
“For all the ambitious scope of spiritual adventure and intellectual rumination, Forest Dark is most affecting in its quiet moments of domestic reflection.” — The Spectator (UK)
“The feelings Epstein and Nicole have about their lives and loves feel hard-earned and true…The resonances between these characters are often profound. Both are searching for their true selves, an ocean away from the old lives that have tested their faith.” — The Economist
“Magnificent. . . . A richly layered masterpiece; creative, profound, insightful, deeply serious, effortlessly elegant, both human and humane. Krauss is a poet and a philosopher, and this latest work does what only the very best fiction can do—startles, challenges and enlightens the reader, while showing the familiar world anew.” — Francesca Segal, Financial Times
“Forest Dark shares much in common with Philip Roth’s writing. Philosophical and intellectual, it explores identity, culture and the connections between the individual and history.” — Sunday Express (London)
“Strange and beguiling . . . a mystery that operates on grounds simultaneously literary and existential . . . metaphysical and emphatically realistic. . . . It’s a perfectly Kafkaesque vision, almost uncanny enough to be sublime.” — Ruth Franklin, Harper’s Magazine
“Illuminating. . . . [Forest Dark] builds to a powerful emotional crescendo and an ending that feels revelatory. Haunting and reflective, poetic and wise, this is another masterful work from one of America’s best writers.” — BookPage
“Krauss, as ever, writes beautifully about complex themes, and she has a keen eye for the way Israel’s culture, slower but more alert to violence, requires its American characters to reboot their perceptions.” — Kirkus Reviews
“She writes insight and revelation better than just about anyone working today…While Krauss’ genius has long been evident, of her four books this one cuts closest to the bone. The woods may be dark but Krauss’ gorgeous sentences light our way through.” — Rebecca Makkai, O Magazine
