Forest Dark audiobook

"But at a certain point the helplessness of our shared love for the children had reached a kind of apex, and then began to decline until it was no longer helpful to our relationship at all, because it only shone a light on how alone each of us was, and, compared to our children, how unloved"."In our own ways, we had each come to understand that we had lost faith in our marriage. And yet we didn't know how to act on this understanding, as one does not know how to act on the understanding, for example, that the afterlife does not exist". Nicole, ....( yes, I did a double take with this character's name choice), is a novelist with writers block and a failing marriage. My mind did somersaults with this name choice. I was instantly 'sad'. Clearly I'm in the dark about the personal lives of Nicole Krause and Jonathan Safran Foer.....but wondered about the parallels between "Forest Dark" and their relationship. I have been thinking about this novel on and off for the past 72 hours. I have mixed feelings. For one thing - I can't for the life of me understand why The Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv was 'chosen' as the central sanctuary. The Hilton Hotel may be a big fancy hotel on the beach but it's no SHRINE. And why Tel Aviv? It's the most Americanized city in Israel. I really don't get it. The beginning was great. We are first introduced to Jules Epstein. It's very clear about what's going on with this wealthy high powered New York Attorney. He's 68 years old ...and something has changed him. No longer speaking out with gusto as he usually did .....instead an unnatural stillness began to settle over everything after his parents died...... Plus the divorce from his wife, Lianne, of more than 30 years, and he retired from his law firm. His behavior changed dramatically by giving possessions away...HUGE EXPENSIVE POSSESSIONS. His three children Jonah, Lucie, and Maya's future inheritance was definitely being jeopardize. ---However .. it was clear that Epstein was having some type of spiritual awakening. There's a couple of hilarious scenes about a "lost coat". My personal favorite 'funny'. EVERYONE RUNS TO ISRAEL WHEN LIFE IS FEELING SUCKIE... I did it!!!! I ran away to Israel hoping to find answers, too, in 1973. Ha, I got sidetracked by the Yom Kippur War. Living in a bomb shelter was no 'Hilton'.So.... Jules Epstein goes to Israel ....hoping to honor his parents Nicole goes to Israel ..... hoping the Hilton will inspire her writing. It's where she has many childhood memories.Both Epstein and Nicole - who don't know each other - never meet - both get sidetracked once in Tel Aviv. ( like all people who visit Israel). You can laugh now! :)HERE IS WHERE THE STORY WAS 'SOMETIMES' BORING TO ME..... and 'unclear' of what was the purpose. Nicole Krause begins to turn this novel into a more intellectual- thought provoking quest about theology. Epstein meets with Rabbi Klausner and tells Epstein that he is a descendent of King David. Nicole meets a retired literature professor ( Friedman), that begins to engage inconversations about 'the truth' about Franz Kafka. I felt .... while Nicole Krauss was taking us on meta-physical journey .... that she was hiding something personal and emotional. The two excerpts that I included in the beginning of this review... never emotionally got explored leaving me feeling empty and sad... even somewhat resentful that I had to read about The Old Testament and debates about Kafka-- but I wasn't getting the truth about the depths of pain from either one of the leading characters. I felt cheated. I wanted more - something more gut truthful about Epstein and Nicole by the time the book ended. So? Do I like this book? Yes and No. Do I recommend it? Absolutely to everyone who is smarter than me. That's about everybody. This novel does require some 'thinking'. Nicole Krause wrote a compelling novel -- I believe Nicole wrote this with purpose - I highly respect and admire her - at the same time - I am grappling to understand some things. 3.7 rating Thank You Harper Collins Publishing and Nicole Krause

I’ve read all three of Nicole Krauss’ previous novels and one thing they all have in common is the writer is well concealed behind all the formal artistry. In this new novel of hers there’s a character called Nicole speaking in the first person with an intelligence at the height of its powers. So the first exciting thing about this was the feeling of intimacy with which Krauss seems to speak her mind. There are two narratives here. The writer Nicole is struggling to write a new novel and is about to split with her husband; the parallel narrative, also about a lost character who runs away to Israel, is perhaps the story the writer is struggling to bring into existence, though they never once obviously connect at any point. Both characters are undergoing break downs; both struggling with the form their lives have taken. Both trying to reconnect with a purer self within. Form itself is one of the themes of this novel. As is the idea of the double lives we all live. In this sense the Nicole of the narrative is both Nicole Krauss and not Nicole Krauss. Kafka too will get to lead a double life in this novel. Krauss in this book focuses on the unlived double life we all sense we’ve forgone for one reason or another.Both Epstein and Nicole meet mysterious strangers who lead them into what might almost be called alternate realities. Nicole is told an extraordinary story about Kafka. That he staged his death in 1924 and lived out a kind of afterlife in Israel. Eventually she will be in possession of a suitcase of his lost papers. Epstein is told he is a descendent of King David. Both narratives build to fabulous denouements. I especially enjoyed Nicole’s epiphany. There were shades of Fellini’s brilliant 8 ½ in the Nicole narrative, the quest to find a new form of inspiration in the annals of memory. And there was some fabulous absurd humour in the Epstein narrative. It’s not difficult to follow the various threads of this novel; but it’s hard to work out what Krauss intended to convey as a whole. The big picture, how the two narratives related to each other, left me scratching my head. Both narratives could probably stand alone as novellas without losing much, if any, significance. I didn’t feel one was feeding the other with vitality or a reciprocal deeper understanding. At times it felt like she was sloughing all the artifice involved in writing a novel, opening a window directly onto the mind’s struggle to compose narrative – perhaps exemplified by the sense that the coalescing of two disparate narratives felt forced and flimsy. It’s perhaps an act of mischief on Krauss’ part that she structures the novel as if in subordination to convention’s laws of order which both Nicole and Epstein are eager to escape from but that this structure seems more like a smoking mirror than robust intricate engineering. In a nutshell, it starts really well, shows some signs of huff and puff towards the middle and winds up brilliantly. It feels like a laboured novel rather than an inspired one. Perhaps cathartic in that she is breaking with her reputation, moving onto new ground, which I found exciting. Don’t expect another History of Love. There’s no whimsy, no attempt to charm the pants off the reader in this novel. It still fascinates me who most influenced who in her marriage with Jonathan Safran Foer – the similarity in tone and subject of History of Love and Extremely Loud is too uncanny to be coincidence. I have a hunch he influenced her more except she bettered him at his own game (which must have been galling!) Personally I’ve always found more depth in Nicole’s books. And this was the case again in their post-divorce books. Forest Dark for me is more poetic and honest and courageous than Here I Am.

Sometimes when writing a review I'm torn between expressing my personal opinion of the book I've read and trying to imagine how others will feel about the book. In other words I don't want to recommend a book others won't like! This is a book I loved reading but suspect others will struggle with. Because the narrative threads are at times obscure and difficult to reconcile. Forest Dark is a very Jewish novel. Krauss has already shown she's a writer one of whose strengths and weaknesses is a desire to charm her readers. Often here it's as if Krauss is writing expressly for Jewish approval. So, though this is a far less self-consciously charming novel than History of Love ,she is again deploying charm as a tool. She is writing for and imagining the response of a specific audience. Or that's how it often felt. The entire novel is set in Israel. Early on, the author confides that she is having problems writing and in many respects this is a novel about the processes of composing a novel, the virtual world between the writer and her fiction. The third person narrative about a rich successful Jewish businessman in the grip of an existential crisis is, we assume, the novel, the author is struggling with. The first person narrator who is once named as Nicole is mired in a failing sterile marriage and visits Israel in pursuit of her novel. She adopts a confessional voice as if she is telling us the truth and nothing but the truth. Except her life soon becomes more fictional than that of her novel's protagonist. True things happen in the virtual world; deception is often the reality in the real world. The narrator is embroiled in a madcap conspiracy theory about Kafka which Krauss does a good job of convincing us might be true. Everyone in the novel, including Kafka, has a divided self and is engaged in a struggle to reconcile outer and inner worlds. This is cleverly dramatized towards the end when Epstein, the fictional character, finds himself on a film set, dressed, in the guise of an extra, as King David. Nothing is what it seems in Forest Dark and yet it is a relentless excavation of truth. I wasn't entirely convinced it worked as a novel - but then, often, it is asking the question, what is a novel? Krauss remains stringently loyal throughout to her themes and her writing is often wonderful. She has lots of interest to say about life and in the end I loved reading it.

The Empty SpaceI 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 lifeI 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.======My Top Ten list this year is selected from a smaller than usual pool. I really only started reading again in May, and even then deliberately kept new books to under 50% of my total. In compiling the list, I also did not exactly follow my original star ratings, but rather the takeaway value after time has passed. In particular, there are two books, Lincoln in the Bardo and Go, Went, Gone) to which I gave only 4 stars, but which I recognize as important books, with more staying power than many that I enjoyed more at the time, but have since forgotten.For some reason, three of the ten books (Forest Dark, A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Three Floors Up) are by Jewish authors, set in Israel. To those, I would add a fourth: Judas by Amos Oz, read at the same time and of similar quality, but actually published at the end of 2016.The ten titles below are in descending order (i.e. with The Essex Serpent being my favorite). The links are to my reviews: 1. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 2. Autumn by Ali Smith 3. Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss 4. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne 5. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 6. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman 7. Exit West by Moshin Hamid 8. Three Floors Up by Eshkol Nevo 9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders10. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny ErpenbeckAnd half that number again that didn't quite make it, in alphabetical order by authors:11. Souvenirs dormants by Patrick Modiano12. All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan13. Improvement by Joan Silber14. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout15. Rose & Poe by Jack Todd

Tu esci di casa“Alla fine ci siamo ammalati di sapere. Ad essere sinceri, io detesto Cartesio e non ho mai capito per quale motivo il suo assioma debba essere fiduciosamente ritenuto la base incrollabile di ogni cosa. Più lui parla di seguire sempre la stessa direzione per uscire dalla foresta, più io mi sento attratta dall'idea di perdermi in quella foresta, dove un tempo vivevamo nella meraviglia, nella consapevolezza che il nostro stupore è il prerequisito di un'autentica coscienza dell'essere e del mondo. Ormai ci resta ben poca scelta a parte abitare negli aridi campi della ragione, e quanto all'ignoto, che un tempo baluginava agli estremi del nostro campo visivo, convogliando le nostre paure, ma anche le nostre speranze e i nostri desideri, possiamo solo guardarlo con ostilità”.Krauss dice di voler perdere il controllo quando lavora e di ritenere che l'amore non esista senza una parte di violenza, e di credere nell'incertezza, negatività esistenziale necessaria. Così i suoi personaggi ne hanno bisogno per superare una crisi di identità, per trovare una soluzione alla solitudine labirintica dalla quale non possono uscire. Jules è un avvocato milionario e filantropo che, dopo aver deciso di dissipare francescanamente la propria ricchezza, insegue le parole dei libri sacri e di uno strano e fantomatico rabbino fino a Tel Aviv; e qui giunge anche Nicole, scrittrice disillusa e instancabile, che viene coinvolta in un mistero letterario sull'eredità di Kafka (i manoscritti appartengono a Israele) e cerca se stessa oltre il dolore e il senso di fallimento. Si incrociano senza incontrarsi le due storie, dialogano poeticamente sul tema delle radici ebraiche, della memoria e del tempo, della relazione minacciosa tra verità e finzione. Nicole Krauss scrive con gentile dolcezza, con carisma, fantasia e invenzione, senza smettere di interrogarsi e indagare il cuore delle cose. L'infanzia è un processo di lenta ricomposizione di se stessi con i materiali presi in prestito dal mondo. In un momento qualsiasi, ogni bambino perde l'ultimo atomo ricevuto dalla madre. Si è ricostituito del tutto, e a quel punto è soltanto e interamente mondo. Su un piano ancora filosofico, scrive Krauss che la dimensione della soglia è appartenuta più che altro a Kafka: soglia di fuga, trasformazione e metamorfosi, di comprensione predisposta alla speranza e al desiderio. Di questo Kafka, l'autrice traccia una biografia filologica e fantastica, che va oltre ciò che possiamo riconoscere in questa sola vita: è suggestivo il concetto di Tzimtzum, la divina contrazione che crea il vuoto dove fare spazio all'universo, sciogliendo la coppia finito e infinito. Secondo l'autrice, Kafka gioiva all'idea di lasciare questo mondo: non perché volesse porre termine alla propria vita, ma perché sentiva di non aver mai vissuto veramente. Scrive Krauss che perciò noi umanità moderna e residuale temiamo di distruggere la forma, così non pensiamo il futuro e abbiamo paura del caos informe, dell'altro da sé (l'opposto dell'ordine appare così inevitabile alla vita). Inserendo nella trama numerosi elementi speculativi, la scrittrice tesse una storia doppia, irreale e sospesa, romanzesca e improbabile, abitata tanto da ombre, atmosfere, progetti e ipotesi che da promesse mantenute, fatti persistenti e figurazioni decisive. Il romanzo narra la fragilità dell'io, l'incoerenza della realtà fattuale, il desiderio di uscire dall'oscurità, il deserto notturno, spazio vuoto di forma e di luce, nel quale soltanto siamo liberi di essere noi stessi e creare. Per un ritorno sì, che non ha niente di rimosso.“E se la vita, che sembra aver luogo in un numero incalcolabile di lunghi corridoi, in sale d'aspetto e città forestiere, su terrazze, in ospedali e giardini, in camere in affitto e treni affollati, si svolgesse in realtà in un solo luogo, un singolo posto da cui sogniamo tutti gli altri?”

Nicole Krauss has always delivered 5 star books, but FOREST DARK is easily her best and most mesmerizing one to date. Poised, elegant, and numinous, it also moved me close to tears and left me exhilarated. She explores that liminal space between darkness and light, the internal and external, emptiness and fullness, and between life and death. Two unrelated but connected characters and their stories are linked thematically in their quests for spiritual, immaterial completion. Jules Epstein, a wealthy lawyer, is left hollowed out after the death of his parents and divorce after 30+ years of marriage. After audaciously retiring, giving away all his material wealth, he now seeks fulfillment by pursuing an equitable donation to charity in his parents’ name. The pull of otherness preoccupies his thoughts. ”He had rarely lifted his head above the powerful currents of his life, being too busy plunging through them. But there were moments now when he saw the whole view, all the way to the horizon. And it filled him equally with joy and with yearning.”A charismatic rabbi, insisting that Epstein was a descendant of King David, is pursuing him to attend a reunion of Davidic descendants in Jerusalem. He is convinced that Jules is one of them. The rabbi also intends to inspire Epstein with wisdom and knowledge and to seek elevation toward the transmigration of the soul. “…a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.” Nicole (interestingly), a writer of Jewish literature, feels lost and blocked. Her marriage is stagnating, and the only love in their home is the love that she and her husband have for their children. Both Nicole and Jules are compelled to make another trip, a place familiar to both of them. This may be the vision quest journey of each of their lives.An aspect of Nicole’s existential crisis and writer’s block, other than her stilted, loveless marriage, had to do with her philosophical outlook of the mystical, and how it impinged on the narrative form. She understood that, in order to create a story, one must take the chaos of the world—the disorder and incoherence—and obscure it to design a form. But it seemed now misguided to her. The things she wrote, she felt, had a greater degree of artifice than truth, “That the cost of administering a form to what was…formless was akin to the cost of breaking the spirit of an animal that is too dangerous to live with.” It didn’t feel impossible, but it felt elusive, and she hoped that the Hilton in Tel Aviv(where she was conceived) held the promise of its aspiration.In Tel Aviv, Nicole meets an older man, Eliezer Friedman, a retired literature professor and possibly an ex-Mossad agent. He tells the writer that Kafka never died in Prague, but was in fact smuggled to Palestine and tended his gardens for the rest of his days. Friedman wants her to go to this alleged house and also to write, for a screenplay, the conclusion of THE TRIAL, which was incomplete at the end of Kafka’s life—or as Friedman would have it—when he faked his own death. As ambivalent as Nicole is, she was driven to embark on this liminal otherness and achieve self-realization.The writer remembers a book about ancient Greece that went into the ancient Greek word for time, for which there were two: “chronos, which referred to chronological time, and kairos, used to signify an indeterminate period in which something of great significance happens, a time that is not quantitative but rather has a permanent nature, and contains what might be called ‘the supreme moment.’”Both Epstein and the melancholy writer are on similar paths to find the presence in the absence, the Tikkun olam, the transformation of the world, which can only proceed from our own internal transformation. The rarefied denouements to their different narratives are written with utter grace and beauty, as is the whole novel. This is a book I can read repeatedly and continue to be astonished at new discoveries. This is certain to be on my top two books of the year, and receive a special place on my shelf. Nicole Krauss is at the pinnacle of her talent. This one didn’t blow my mind—it blew it open.

It feels likely that if this novel were sent over the transom from a previously unpublished writer it would never have found an agent much less a publisher. The adjectives that came to mind as I read included "turgid," "boring," "overwrought," "portentous," "pointless," and "self-absorbed." Even so I was determined to set all these judgments aside. I tried instead to think of this novel as a kind of found art. What if I had found this manuscript in a trash receptacle in a Greyhound bus station in Topeka, for instance? I would have read it with relish, and I would have marveled at the mind that had created it. As I read I let go of any standard I might have for Nicole Krauss, successful literary author, and to take the text on its own terms. By approaching my reading with this frame of mind, the many awfulnesses of the novel were not only tolerable, but endearing.

Nicole Krauss is undoubtedly a cerebral author. Her books demand a lot of a reader, not always providing quick and easy answers, challenging him to dig deep for meaning and content. In this case, two threads seemingly running parallel threaten to converge. Jules Epstein's story is told in third person, and for me, was the more engaging of the two. Nicole, protagonist of the second, tells her own story in first person, and as it contains elements of Krauss's personal life, it could be argued this is a fictionalized autobiography and/or meta fiction. For most of the book, both protagonists are in Israel, Tel Aviv to be exact, specifically, the Hilton Hotel. But each is in search of identity and transformation, Kafka being the vehicle for Nicole, and for Jules, his supposed descent from the lineage of King David (arguably the most complex hero from the Bible). How these stories advance is for the reader to determine.

Just when I thought I couldn't possibly love Nicole Krauss' books any more. Great House is one of my absolute favorite novels. This one is just so achingly beautiful and profoundly interesting on every level. Demanding and rewarding in equal measures.