Title: Forest Dark
Author: Nicole Krauss
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN:
9781408871799
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 290
Source: Flipkart Review Program
Rating: 4.5/5
Some
books demand your proper attention. They want to hold your hand and transport
you into another world, where respective characters breath and you feel their
every move, every emotion.
Nichole
Krauss’s Forest Dark comes into that category only. If you think you could
finish it in few sittings, you are not doing justice with these certain reads.
I have read Krauss before, loved the prose then, and I am glad she didn’t lose
her charm into her recent launch FOREST DARK. Her narrative is so absorbing,
and magnetic that you want to savour it sentence by sentence. It makes you
think and suffer and then leaves you with questions that don’t need to get
answered.
Forest
Dark begins with disappearance of Jules Epstein, 70 years old, rich lawyer, who
recently got retired, divorced and father of three. He has spent his whole life
running into a race where he gets everything he aspires but after retirement he
inclines towards spiritual thoughts, for instance what’s the meaning of money?
What is real definition of success? And he decides to donate his wealth,
whereas his lawyer friend takes this donation thing as some disease and calls
it radical charity.
Besides
that there is other protagonist, Nichole (When I read the name I thought it is
some kind of memoir and then I read her interview at various platforms, Nichole
is nothing to do with author Krauss except she created this profound
character) So, Nicole is 40 years old novelist, living in Brooklyn with her two
sons, her marriage is drifting apart. At one place Nicole express herself that
she wanted to be writer who is free, without responsibilities who can write
create her heroes, live their insecurities, happiness their life but she was
not brave enough. I found that part was so beautifully written; I underlined it
and mentioned it too, here in the Reader’s Moment.
Krauss’
Forest Dark is interlaced with two protagonists, their lives run into parallel
world and that makes the story interesting. Yes I found it bit of confusing at
some places but that’s totally acceptable when you get to read such sensitive
work. With many Twists and turns, quirky characters with flaws, a new
perception about Isolation, and the journey of self discovery, Forest Dark
surely holds a soft place into reader’s heart.
READER’s
MOMENT
Beyond this, Epstein made no effort
to explain himself to anyone, except once to Maya. Having arrived thirteen
years after Jonah, and ten after Lucie, at a less turbulent and agitated epoch
in Epstein’s life, Maya saw her father in a different light. There was a
natural ease between them. On a walk through the northern reaches of Central
Park, where icicles hung from the great outcrops of schist, he told his
youngest daughter that he had begun to feel choked by all the things around
him. That he felt an irresistible longing for lightness—it was a quality, he
realized only now, that had been alien to him all his life. They stopped at Theupper
Lake, thinly sheeted with greenish ice. When a snowflake landed on Maya’s black
eyelashes, Epstein gently brushed it away with his thumb, and Maya saw her
father in fingerless gloves pushing an empty shopping cart down Upper Broadway [...]
How else to explain myself, then?
Explain why I went along with Friedman, refusing to heed all the obvious
warnings. One often hears people say that it’s easy to misunderstand. But I
disagree. People don’t like to admit it, but it’s what passes as understanding
that seems to come too easily to our kind. All day long people busy themselves
with understanding every manner of thing under the sun—themselves, other
people, the causes of cancer, the symphonies of Mahler, ancient catastrophes.
But I was going in another direction now. Swimming against the forceful current
of understanding, the other way. Later there would be other, larger failures to
understand—so many that one can only see a deliberateness in it: a stubbornness
that lay at the bottom like the granite floor of a lake, so that the more clear
and transparent things became, the more my refusal showed through. I didn’t want
to see things as they were. I had grown tired of that. [...]
When I was young, I thought that I
would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes.
But in the end I wasn’t brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention.
I hadn’t gotten far enough along in the deep, bitter, bright education of
the self to know what I could and couldn’t withstand—to know my capacities for
constriction, for disorder, for passion, for instability, for pleasure and
pain—before I settled on a narrative for my own life and committed myself to
living it. Writing about other lives can, for a while, obscure the fact that
the plans one has made for one’s own have insulated one from the unknown rather
than drawn one closer to it.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Nicole Krauss is the author of the
international bestseller The History of Love, which was published by W.W.
Norton in 2005. It won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing,
France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Ėtranger, was named #1 book of the year by
Amazon.com, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes.
Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles
Times Book Award for First Fiction. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta’s
Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 The New Yorker named her
one of the 20 best writers under 40.
Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She recently completed a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She recently completed a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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