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Meet a sampling of the authors
many of them
first-time novelists — who bring their work
to this year's Book Fair.

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Wan Walks Into A Room'

Expires 11/30/02

A

fter emergency surgery to remove a small
brain tumor, a Columbia University profes-
sor has retained all his analytic functions,
but lost 24 years of memories. That's Samson
Greene's entrance in Nicole Krauss' accomplished
debut novel, Man Walk_C Into a Room (Nan A. Talese,
Doubleday; $23.95).
Greene is found collapsed in the desert near Las
Vegas. His description matches that of a Jewish pro-
fessor who mysteriously disappeared in New York
City days earlier. When his wife, Anna, flies out to
the hospital, he doesn't know her.
They return home together, but he no longer
remembers his friends, colleagues, books or
moments captured in photos around their New York
apartment. And, he doesn't seem to want to remem-
ber. Eventually, it becomes clear to Anna that the
person she knows isn't coming back.
Krauss, a poet-turned-novelist who writes beauti-
ful sentences, builds upon this scenario to create an
unusual first novel. Her effort is boldly different, a
literary novel of ideas, with compelling characters.
Interviewed in Manhattan, Krauss, 27, speaks
thoughtfully about memory.
She grew up in New York, in Westbury, Long Island,
as the grandchild
of Holocaust survivors. Each is from a
b
different country; her mother was born in Israel. Other
relatives died in concentration camps, work camps and
in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Krauss has written previously that she does not
recall "a time when I did not understand in my
blood, that above all else, the one thing I must do
was remember."
At an early age, Krauss says she began writing in
order "to record things, preserve things." She has a
sense of a beautiful, sad and complicated world that
was lost.
Interviewing her grandmother, the older woman
had Krauss turn off the tape recorder when she
described her father forced by the Nazis to mow the
lawn with his teeth. Later, Krauss understood that
her grandmother's message was to remember life
rather than loss, pain and tragedy.
As Krauss began writing this novel, she sought a
solution to the ache of nostalgia. She realized that
"to be freed of the responsibility of remembering is
a horrifying thing."
In writing about Anna and Samson, she was inter-
ested in the connection between memory, identity

and intimacy. The book ends with Anna's voice, in
an epilogue.
"She ultimately had been betrayed by Samson,"
Krauss explains. "He couldn't uphold his end of the
deal, to say `I love you and I will remember you.'
That's so poignant, the idea of the difficulty of hold-
ing this balance."
As a poet, Krauss, who holds master's degrees from
Stanford, Oxford and Courtauld Institute in
London, learned "the .power of very few words." But
she prefers writing fiction. Her next novel centers on
an 80-year-old man and a 13-year-old girl.
"A novel is like a big house, with something always
to be worked on, but you can live in it. I love that."
Krauss is pleased her grandparents have read her
novel. "Not that I'm writing their story," she says.
But "I wouldn't be writing my story were it not for
their stories. I feel proud to be doing that."

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Deli Sandwiches

Corned Beef**%,s,
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euben
Tigskey Reuben

— Sandee Brawarsky

Nicole Krauss (with novelist Dara Horn) speaks 7:30
p.m. Monday, Nov. 11, at the Jewish Community
Center in Oak Park and 10 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, at
the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield.

Come in and try one!

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NICOLE KRAUSS

Exploring the
connection between
memory, identity
and intimacy,
poet-turned-novelist
Nicole Krauss has
written a literary
novel of ideas,
with compelling
characters.

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