Full disclosure: I love Nicole Krauss. I have a history with her. It started when I randomly bought The History of Love on the way to live in the Chilean city of Valparaiso, only to realise later that part of the novel is set there. My husband and I have bonded over her. My daughter is named after one of her characters. I am evangelical about her work in the most annoying of ways. I came to this book open, ready and determined to love it. I did not.

I had also assumed this review would centre around around the inevitable comparisons to Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest tome Here I Am. As her ex-husband’s work –– about a pre-divorce Brooklynite coming to terms with his life, broken relationships, his understanding of Judaism and connection to Israel –– bears a certain resemblance to this book (about a pre-divorce Brooklynite coming to terms with her life, broken relationships, her understanding of Judaism and connection to Israel.) But it doesn’t. There is just too much more jaw-to-the-floor strangeness about Forest Dark to waste time on that.

Because this is a novel about how much the author hates novels, hates writing them, and probably hates us for reading them. Or so it seems.

Under the cover of the “fictional” main character –– lets call her ‘Nicole’ (because that’s her name) –– real Nicole is very open about this. Her character says: “I wanted to write what I wanted to write, however much it offended, bored, challenged or disappointed people.” How’s that for setting out your stall?

You get a sense that she has come to see fiction writing as trifling, and is not prepared to indulge it. Fictional Nicole be-moans that everyone’s an artist these days. In her books she feels the “degree of artifice” has become greater that the “degree of truth.” Even reading stories to her kids at bedtime she feels she’s stifling them by presenting their young minds with such conventional narrative structures.

Instead Nicole Krauss sets about deconstructing the novel and dares her readers to come with her. As Fictional Nicole says: “It is never really a novel that one dreams of writing, but something far more encompassing for which one uses the word novel to mask delusions of grandeur or a hope that lacks clarity.”

And so to the great un-masking. That she has followed this dream so boldly fills me with admiration. It’s an ambitious and fascinating experiment, and I’m slightly in awe. But oh my goodness does it make for a frustrating and joyless read!

“Why had I really come to Tel Aviv?” Fictional Nicole wonders, quite a way into the book. “In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does… Narrative cannot sustain formlessness.”

WHY DID YOU COME TO TEL AVIV? I NEED A REASON! I shout at the book.

She goes on, “Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.”

It’s at this point I realise it’s going to be a very long haul.

That’s at 23% according to my Kindle. At 41% Fictional Nicole is amazed she’s started questioning hotel housekeepers, “so I might discover that there was a story here after all.” (The housekeeper’s response? “No English.”) At 57% the other main character, Epstein, observes: “And now other things would have to happen.” Uh-huh.

It’s at 63% that I first suspect (perhaps mistakenly) the budding shoots of an actual narrative. (Up to here, Fictional Nicole and Epstein have separately found themselves at the Tel Aviv Hilton, both searching for some indefinable thing, and both being led on some indefinable quest. This is where a delightful supposition about Kafka pops up.)

Nicole Krauss appears to so disdain the narrative form, that Forest Dark often feels more like non-fiction. And not just because of the autobiographical undertones. Some passages –– especially those on Kafka, or the descriptions of Freud’s theories –– feel like university essays. At another time she describes the content of a radio programme, on the multiverse theory, that Fictional Nicole was listening to while doing the dishes:

“That as a result of the gravitational waves that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang –– or a series of Big Bang repulsions, as evidence now suggests –– the early universe experienced an inflation that caused an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos, creating completely different universes with unknown physical properties, without stars, perhaps, or atoms, or light, and that, taken all together, these comprise the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy.”

It somewhat stems the narrative flow.

The physicist on the radio, apparently, had a “mesmerizing voice,” perhaps that’s what we’re missing here.
The main trouble is that this language seeps through the whole book. Even a charming anecdote about two kids diving in a swimming pool becomes:

“As for what happened next, I have no explanation for it. Or none beyond the possibility that the laws we cling to in order to assure ourselves that all is as it seems be have occluded a more complex view of the universe, one that forgoes the comfort of squeezing the world to fit the limited reach of our comprehension.”

Spoiler: her brother found an earring.

Only one page later Krauss summarises the same thought with all the concise poetic beauty I love her for: “...the accordion folds tucked beneath the surface of all that appears to be flat.” But these flashes of old Krauss are rarer than I’d like.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to like. It may feel much less lyrical and poetic than her earlier work, as though this decoration has been deemed unnecessary and stripped, but occasionally the odd image flowers up, like this one: “Maya … woke in the night feeling a tremor along the invisible line that still connected her to her father.” Or the perfect precision of her language shines, like here: “Epstein was very polished. He was not refined –– he had no wish to lose his impurities –– but he had been brought to a high shine.” And she paints some wonderfully lucid portraits of intimacy.

And I LOVE, in quite a giddy way, it’s shameless adoption of unlikeability. It a world where both female authors and female characters are under pressure to be ‘likeable’ Nicole Krauss doesn’t seem to care in the slightest. She doesn’t paint herself as someone to like, and, to be honest, she doesn’t seem to like her readers that much either. Are either of these things relevant to the quality of her literature? No. It’s bold. As is the existential quest at the centre of this book.

I admire what she’s trying to do, and I’m very glad she tried to do it. But … I just didn’t enjoy reading it very much. I remain affectionately bewildered by it. I still love Nicole Krauss. If you ask who my favourite author is, it’s still her. Please go out and read Great House, or The History of Love, or even this, but you’ll need a braver, more intellectual, approach than I could manage.

DNF'd this one at 60%, it just wasn't for me. Liked some of the themes, but overall had no idea what the point was.

Started this book but couldn't finish it. It felt depressing and I had no connection to the characters.

I found this book confusing. I expected the two protagonists to meet but they did not. Both had a Jewish background and were of different generations but both seemed lost and I do not feel this problem was solved.. It was interesting reading about modern day Israel, but I did not feel the characters were realistic.

http://www.librarything.com/work/19322895

I find it difficult to rate this book. I thoroughly emjoy reading this beautifully written and intelligent book......but..... I find it really hard to want to read it. I have the same problems with Proust, I keep dipping into the text because of the prose but cannot maintain a level of interest in the storyline to complete. I have been treating the author's work as on ongoing process, a bit like a poetry book, but still have not completed it. This could just be me and where my life is now or it could just be too intelligent a read for me, I really do not know. I will keep on reading and hope to reach the end one day but because of this, do I rate five stars for writing or three stars because I cannot maintain interest in the story? My other problem is that it feels like a religious theory text, which is why I would buy it for my sixth form college library as we teach religious studies!

Forest Dark is a book of two halves. There are alternating narratives that never cross (or do they – the end is ambiguous). Jules Epstein, a wealthy and influential Jewish lawyer who has spent his life acquiring stuff, suddenly decides he wants to give it all away. He takes a trip to Israel with this in mind.

The other narrator is also headed to Tel Aviv. She is an author (who happens to be called Nicole). She is struggling to write and is contemplating the end of her marriage.

The book opens with Epstein and I enjoyed the book at this point. It has a dry humour while also asking some interesting questions. I loved the prose. I don’t normally highlight fiction while I’m reading, but there were sentences that were so beautifully crafted and nuanced that I wanted to return and reflect on them (although I haven’t, yet).

When I got to the author narration I stalled. She just wasn’t very interesting. The realist elements felt too banal and the absurdist elements too ridiculous. It felt like the author (Nicole Krauss, not the ‘fictional’ Nicole) had some issues she wanted to work through (creativity, marriage, kids) and was still too close to them to make them into art. (I understand, her ex, Jonathan Safran Foer, has also written a novel about marital breakdown, Here I Am, so maybe she felt she had to put her side.)

There is an odd Kafka storyline. I’ve noted an apologetic tone in some reviews, words to the effect of, ‘I don’t really like this book but I’m probably just not clever enough.’ Just because a novel references Kafka it does not mean it’s good!

The privilege of the narrator grates. She lives in a world where relatives keep spare apartments in world cities which you can drop into any time, where the Hilton is like a second home and the manager knows your name. She never appears to notice that not everyone lives like this. Given that this world is satirised in the Epstein story, I assume the ‘real’ Nicole has more sensitivity in this than the ‘fictional’ Nicole but I couldn’t find any sense of irony or self-deprecation in the narration which might have made her more bearable.

It’s taken me a few weeks to get through Forest Dark. I kept hoping it would get better (it didn’t). Then I reached that point where I felt I was too far in to stop. I focused on the Epstein bits (there were some nice set pieces, though it didn’t quite hang together for me) and I gritted my teeth and skimmed the author story.

I’ve heard that Nicole Krauss has written some great books and the quality of the prose made me want to try another one, but this was, for me, was something of an ordeal.

If this book were a painting it would fall into the surrealist genre.

I had to read Forest Dark twice and while doing so I also had to question my intelligence. Krauss writes well. She is articulate and her writing is rich and dense. However, I found it very difficult to follow her stream of consciousness writing. Her paragraphs are like people who never stop talking and their stories become so intertwined that listening to them becomes confusing.

There are two stories in one book and I tried very hard to find the connection between the two. That’s when I questioned my intelligence. Eventually, I realised that the connection might be two people going through a surreal time in their lives. In a way both lost and yet somehow finding themselves.

Epstein is the one story. He travels from New York to Israel and I think he does vanish. I lost that plot somewhere in the stream of consciousness writing because it felt like I was reading two books at a time. The story of how Epstein got lost on its own could be a good one.

Then the other story in the book is based on an author who also goes to Israel. This journey is to find a way to unblock her writer's block. She bases her story on Kafka and many different streams of consciousness tangents that are quite inviting at times, serious at times, and very surreal at times which does create some humour.

BonnieK

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Now what, exactly, is this book all about? What is the point of it? At times it reads like an extended essay. At others it consists of rambling digressions. What it doesn’t read like is a compelling and engaging novel about characters who draw the reader in and make us want to learn about them. There are two narrative threads, surely a rather outworn device by now, which are only very loosely interconnected. Told in alternate chapters, we have a novelist having trouble with both her writing and her marriage, and Jacob Epstein, a rich American, who after having sold his assets, moves to Israel to find a suitable way to commemorate his parents. The novelist finds herself recruited into a mysterious project related to Kafka and the possibility that he survived and moved to Israel. Epstein disappears. Ultimately I found the novel vacuous and pointless, and simply can’t understand all the rapturous press reviews – even given that press reviews are basically of the “you pat my back” type. Definitely not for me this one – far too pretentious for its own good.

Nicole Krauss is an extremely talented writer, to give just one example here's her description of a writer's faltering marriage: "like a ship without sails, they no longer seemed to take us anywhere: the words exchanged did not bring us closer, neither to each other nor to any understanding." Sadly for me, in between the bursts of brilliance I found this to be a very confusing jumble of a few different mysteries that vaguely overlap. Jules Epstein, an older rich successful Jewish son mourning his parents is oddly and dramatically releasing his assets as he jets from swanky NYC boardroom overlooking Central Park to the Hilton in Tel Aviv; another story is convoluted and fanciful, about an afflicted mom whose name I didn't catch who leaves her husband and kids in the States to run off to Israel - I didn't understand who she was or what she was on about, first she's philosophizing and spouting analytical theory, and then all of a sudden she's a writer researching a story at the Tel Aviv Hilton. The third story is a historical one involving Franz Kafka.

The coincidences throughout the book come across less as thematic than kind of haphazard and jarring. Even the inclusion of photographs seemed random to me, at least on the Kindle version I was reading. All the external characters had so much detail and depth to them, making them exhausting to follow especially considering none of their mysteries were resolved by the end. And maybe this is totally petty of me, but why take the title for a book about Kafka learning Hebrew from a quote of Dante's as translated by Longfellow?

I loved the quality of the prose in Forest Dark. However, after a while I found myself skipping pages in search of lyrical passages because not a lot was happening in the narrative. I'm probably something of an action junky whilst appreciating the quality of the storytelling, and I'd sum up this book as being long on the latter perhaps at the expense of the action. Read it, if only for the quality of the prose.

Nicole Krauss is obviously a great writer. The language is both beautiful and insightful, and the descriptions are compelling, evoking everything from the sights, smells and sounds of Israel down to the way somebody gets into a car. But I found nothing here to engage my emotions. I didn't care about the characters, perhaps because they didn't seem to care about anybody themselves. There weren't many meaningful interactions, although I see that may have been deliberate, to point up our essential isolation, and I suppose the references to Kafka are a clue.

I tried to get on with this book but could not get into it so am unable to review

I thought Nicole Krauss's Great House was excellent and I was looking forward to this very much. Sadly, I thought Forest Dark was self-regardingly flashy and ultimately empty.

The book centres around two Jewish characters who are, in their different ways, having crises of identity and reassessing both their lives and their relationships with Israel and Judaism. Jules Epstein is a hugely successful businessman who begins to give away his possessions and have a sort of holiday from being himself, while Nicole is a writer struggling with writer's block who leaves her family to…well…find herself wouldn't be an inappropriate cliché. The two stories intercut with each other – although I don’t really know why, other than that it's the fashion at the moment.

There is a huge amount of intellectualising here, which would be fine by me if it made some sense or had real depth – but most of it doesn't. I know a lot of professional critics think this is a brilliant masterpiece, but it just made me cross in the end and I'm glad that neither the characters nor the author (nor Kafka, come to that) could hear what I was saying about them because I was driven to some thoroughly reprehensible language as I was reading. Leaving aside the almost invariably ghastly idea of a writer writing about a writer who is struggling to write and the undoubtedly postmodern something-or-other of naming the fictional writer after herself, Krauss goes in for a lot of what seemed to me to be show-off cleverness for its own sake – much of which isn't really clever at all.

For example, there's a long passage where Nicole hears a radio broadcast about modern cosmology and then considers the nature of knowledge. We get stuff like this: "But in a multiverse, the concepts of known and unknown are rendered useless, for everything is equally known and unknown," which, frankly, is unmitigated tosh. Or: "In the end we have made ourselves ill with knowledge." Really? How have we done that, exactly? I suspect that quite a few people who are alive because of modern medical knowledge might well have something to say on the matter. Or "Now, we have little choice but to live in the arid fields of reason." What, you really think *that* is the problem at the moment? Allow me to present you with some alternative facts. There's also a sort of variation on solipsism which sounds as though a hippy, still tripping on the acid they took at Woodstock, has been taken to see The Matrix and, having speculated that each of us, in our own mind, may create space itself and everything in it for ourselves, Nicole says "In that moment I knew unequivocally that if I was dreaming my life from anywhere, it was the Tel Aviv Hilton." Er…that would be the Tel Aviv Hilton which only exists in your dream, would it? And so on and so on.

I suspect that Krauss is trying to suggest that we have lost sight of the wonder of the unknown and the numinous, a view with which I have a good deal sympathy, but writing this sort of nonsense certainly doesn't make the case. (And in my view, Eliot's "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" says much of it better in two brief sentences.) I do realise that this is a novel and not a philosophical treatise, but in order to have any real content it surely requires some semblance of rationality, or at least originality of imagery. Much of this just read to me like someone trying to show off how clever they are and getting it embarrassingly wrong.

So, I'm afraid I hated Forest Dark. There have been some very fine novels about identity in the modern world recently (including Jewish identity). Salman Rushdie's The Golden House, David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar and even Will Self's Phone all spring to mind. This doesn't begin to compare, I'm afraid. Nicole Krauss can still write a good sentence and come up with an arresting image from time to time, but as a novel I thought this was very poor. I'm sorry to have to say this about a writer whom I respect, but my advice is to avoid this book.

This was my first introduction to Nicole Kraus and the introduction was a pleasant one.

Forest Dark intertwines the stories of Jules Eptein and an unnamed writer reminiscent of Kraus.

At the beginning of the novel Jules Epstein is powerful and rich, but he gradually lets go of his possessions after losing his coat and phone until he loses more than he can afford.

The unnamed Brooklyn writer tries to create a new reality while her marriage is failing and attempts to lift her writer's block trying to assess the value of a new project she is presented with.

While the two characters never meet there are a number of parallels in their stories.

-They both go to Israel
-They both end up in the desert
-Both have a failed marriage
-Both meet a mysterious person who takes them along and tells them they are special. Epstein is proclaimed to be a descendant of King David and the writer is chosen to work on Kafka relics.

I enjoyed the reading, it was emotional without being sentimental, but in the end there were too many loose ends for me. I don't like authors to spell everything out, but especially the writer's story line left me confused.

After the death of his parents, Jules Epstein leaves for the Hilton in TelAviv and, after renting a rundown flat, appears to vanish. A strange thing to happen considering his conspicuousness in New York society. Meanwhile a novelist with writer’s block leaves for the same hotel, where she is contacted by a man claiming to be a professor of literature, who wants her to become involved in a project on Kafka. This is where her life begins to take on something akin to one of Kafka’s metaphysical narratives.

Forest Dark is a read you need to set aside to become one with. It is a novel where real life appears to have created a platform from which a writer’s imagination has taken hold and made the mundane intriguing.

The novelist’s role feels more of a voyeur, than a participant and not a character which the reader can become too passionate about. This is interesting because it is Epstein who initially feels more distant, particularly because, as a reader, you’re trying to fathom out his strange behavior in wanting to shed his belongings and wealth. He is also written in the third person. The novelist on the other hand is written in the first person, which allows you to enjoy a privileged view into her life as she progresses through her day with her family in America. But as the book goes on, Epstein begins to ender himself to you as his life becomes more embedded in his journey of getting in touch with his heritage. He is an awkward man, but this awkwardness and tentative forays into the origins of his culture are often humorous and poignant at the same time.

The sections involving the novelist have the feel of W G Sebald’s style of writing, as the fictional world begins to bleed into the real one of Kafka’s biography and the author’s life as she becomes involved in some of Kafka’s unpublished work. It is material that has found its way into the hands of an elderly lady, who is in a battle with the state of Israel as to whether such important documents should belong solely to the private individual; an event which actually happened. This part of the writing is interesting but seems to slow the pace of the novel and temporarily shift it off track, making the plot at times difficult to keep a hold of. But once you get used to these meanderings the result is a book to keep a reader absorbed and puzzling over life, the turns it can take and the transformations in people as a result of them.

Written by one of my favorite authors, I have been counting down for the publication date of "Forest Dark." On a whim, I decided to request an ARC from NetGalley... and my wishes came true! I don't think anything can TOUCH "The History of Love," one of my favorite books of all time. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing that I will always compare anything Krauss has written to that book. It singly handedly changed what I expected from authors... what I valued in a book... she is an amazing storyteller. With that being said, "Forest Dark" is an excellent book. There were times when my mind started to stray... maybe it is because I am not very familiar with Franz Kafka or with Judaism, and things started to feel a little more essay-ish than fiction. I wondered if the female (nameless?) character was the author herself. If so, I saw a similar trend in Krauss' husband's latest novel about themes of marital hardship/divorce and that is really sad. I hope it is not a reflection of what is going on in their own life bc the two of them are my favorite couple! I admire their work so much and I will read anything the two of them put out.

I had high hopes for Forest Dark, having previously loved The History of Love, but was really disappointed.

Krauss' writing is as beautiful and clever as ever; she creates settings which are incredibly real, so much so that I found myself wondering how much on the ground research she had done, however my admiration of her research points to why I really didn't enjoy this book. Quite simply, while I could admire her writing, the narrative didn't make me want to keep reading.

The two interconnected stories, of the elderly Jules and the younger novelist (Nicole? One thing which annoyed me was the lack of detail about her in her first section) were at times really intriguing. However just as I'd become interested the narrative would either detour or drag on through worthy topics such as Middle Eastern politics or theology.

I felt that Krauss probably had lots of important ideas she wanted to get across, but did so at the expense of telling a good story, so for me, unfortunately Forest Dark was a dull and disappointing read.

To be honest I struggled with this book. Yes, it is beautifully written and complex but I was never sure where it was actually going. At its heart are two characters: Jules Epstein, a wealthy lawyer and Nicole, a well-known author. They are both drawn back to Tel Aviv where they had previously lived.

It is a philosophical work and draws on Judaism, the work of Kafka, the state of Israel and the concept of metamorphosis. Both characters come to Tel Aviv in search of something. In Jules’ case to establish a memorial for his parents and in Nicole’s a way to cure her writer’s block. They are both diverted from these aims and drawn into other events. I expected that at some point they would meet but that doesn’t happen and basically the two stories peter out.

Whilst I appreciated the elegance of the writing and some of the philosophical musing the novel contains, I was left with a feeling of so what?

ARC received from NetGalley and publisher in exchange for an honest review. Thank you.