Forest Dark is a very well-written literary fiction novel which tells the story of Jules Epstein, a middle-aged man who - in a phase of self-questioning about his life, its trajectory and his decisions - goes missing in Israel. To the mystification of his children, Jules's life changes overnight, and then he disappears.

I think literary fiction fans and people who love Ian McEwan would really enjoy this novel. Unfortunately it just wasn't for me - I couldn't get into it even though the premise sounded great. It was a little slow, and we're very 'inside the characters' heads' - which can work really well but wasn't quite what I was looking for.

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss was not what you could call an easy read. In fact, there were several points whilst reading it where I almost gave up on it but I chose to persevere. I still can’t decide if that was a good thing or not.
Forest Dark is a book you need utter concentration for and preferably total silence. I had neither and that is probably why I struggled. Have you ever read a book that made you feel like you weren’t quite smart enough to read it? This was one of those books for me. After finishing it I felt like I didn’t quite understand the point of it but that the fault lay with me and not with the book. After speaking to others who have read it I have found I am not the only one.
Having said all this I cannot say that I disliked this book, there were times when I loved it. It was beautifully written. Nicole Krauss’ writing style reminded me of Paulo Coelho, particularly the spiritual and theological themes which were present throughout the book.
What I am trying to say is that I enjoyed it even though it was hard work to read.
In terms of the layout of the book it was peppered with various photos of places relevant to the plot. The point of view alternated between the two main characters.
Eliezer Friedman is a larger than life ex-literary professor with a taste for luxury so his friends and family found it difficult to understand why months before his disappearance he chooses to start giving his possessions away.
Nicole is a celebrated Jewish author currently struggling in both her work life and her home life. Hoping for a way of finding herself she flees to Tel Aviv. Whilst there she meets Epstein and he tells her he has a mysterious proposition for her.
At the time of his disappearance, Epstein had been living in Tel Aviv for three months. He had rented an apartment but refused to let his family inside, preferring instead to meet his family at the Hilton for breakfast.
His family noticed other changes in him in the time leading up to his disappearance.
“In those final months Epstein had become difficult to reach. No longer did his answers come hurtling back regardless of the time of day or night. If before he’d always had the last word it was because he’d never not replied. But slowly, his messages had become more and more scarce. Time expanded between them because it had expanded in him…His family and friends became accustomed to his irregular silences, and so when he failed to answer anything at all during the first week of February, no one became instantly alarmed.”
All that was found of him in the police search was his briefcase abandoned in the desert.
This quote about how his family dealt with his disappearance also sums up how I felt after finishing the book:
“Jonah, Lucie, and Maya learned things about their father that they hadn’t known. But in the end, they got no closer to finding out what he meant by it all, or what had become of him.”
Prior to his disappearance Epstein had slowly been shedding himself of his money and possessions much to the chagrin of his family and the utter bewilderment of the executor of his will. He told his family he was getting rid of everything in order to create some thinking space.
Nicole is in the process of trying to write a book when we first meet her. She is suffering extreme writing block because all she can think about is her birthplace: The Hilton hotel in Tel Aviv.
One of the things that struck me when reading this was the correlation between Nicole’s life and the author’s own, in particular, her marital breakdown.
‘I was, as I’ve said, in a difficult place in my life and my work. The things I’d allowed myself to believe in – the unassailability of love, the power of narrative, which could carry people through their lives together without divergence, the essential health of domestic life – I no longer believed in. I had lost my way.”
One of my favourite things about Nicole Krauss’ writing is the way she described Tel Aviv and made it come alive for me.
“It was Winter in Tel Aviv, and as such the city didn’t make sense, being based around the sun and the sea, a Mediterranean city up at all hours that got more frenetic the later it became. Dirty leaves and pages of old newspapers blew down the streets, and sometimes people plucked them out of the air and put them over their heads to protect themselves from the occasional rain. The apartments were all cold because they had stone floors and during the hot months, which felt interminable, it seemed absurd to imagine it could ever be cold again, so no one bothered to install central heating.”
The religious history aspects of Forest Dark I could have done without but I enjoyed reading about Kafka.
I found this a difficult book to pin down but I enjoyed it none the less and can’t say I regret the time I spent reading it..

While I enjoyed the description of the book and plot - from the blurb and NetGalley- I got bogged down several times. One of the main characters is a writer, and her highly intellectual philosophical/physics/psychological thoughts were hard for me to get through. I enjoyed the dreamlike plot of the first third of the books, and the excellent descriptions of places in Israel. Would recommend to people who enjoy Paul Auster and other philosophical novels.

The writing in this novel is excellent, but I could not connect with the concept or the characters. I needed more meat than was available in the plot. Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC. I apologize for the paltry response.

I only read 25% of this book and then gave up, The story is totally lost in pages of philosophical ramblings and Jewish angst. You might call it literary but I call it pretentious and boring. Judging on reviews of her previous books, they seem to be much the same. Some people love this sort of thing. Personally I like to be entertained and to get lost in the story, not read the thoughts of a character who when she arrives home, thinks she is already there!

I've given up 30% through this book. It's not that I didn't find some enjoyment in reading it, it's that it became harder and harder to pick it up. I'm not a fan of the two thread novel format generally and, for me, this is a clear example of why.

Essentially we have two unrelated people, a female author who feels trapped in both her domestic and professional lives - she's held as an icon by the Jewish people who feel she champions them in her writing and resents the role - and Epstein, a successful man who feels trapped by his wealth and is earnestly trying to give away as much of it as he can. Both were born in Tel Aviv, were living in the US but have been drawn back to Israel. With Epstein's character, nothing much happens except that he's grumpy. The female author is approached by a professor of literature she doesn't know who wants her to work on some of Kafka's unfinished, not yet public, work. I thought oh no! we're going to analyse Kafka now.

I found the style wearily didactic at times. Characters have clunky conversations about religion or philosophy that read like a school book. I began to wonder where this was all going and then wondered if it was going anywhere. I read a few Goodreads reviews, realised it wasn't really going anywhere, looked at my to-read shelf and thought nope! life is too short! There will be those who love this style of writing but it's just not for me.

With thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC.

This is a deeply complex novel and I will probably need to reread it to fully grasp all of it subtleties.The story is built around two central characters. Jules Epstein a 68 year old man of considerable wealth who after 35 years of marriage and retirement from a legal firm decides to shed the bulk of his wealth and disappear to a hotel in Tel Aviv. Nicole an author with writer’s block checks into the same hotel leaving a struggling marriage behind her. Both characters are searching for some meaning to their lives and Krauss beautifully captures the frailties of the mind.

Epstein meets a rabbi who is planning a project relating to King David and claims that Epstein is a direct descendant and Nicole meets a literary scholar who tries to convince her that Kafka didn't die but was smuggled into Israel. They are each presented with an adventure of which neither could have imagined and where they feel their true identities are rooted.

This is quite a cerebral book and I personally would have liked a bit more emotion however in saying that Krauss gives great insight into the human need for identity.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

Krauss has a poetic style and the book was beautifully written and crafted. The longer, speculative passages about philosophy or science have a particular way of slowly drawing you in and sticking in your mind. However, overall I was struck by the detail and depth of the book and its writing more than I was by the plot; I appreciated the skill of the book more than I purely enjoyed just reading it.

This is a fascinating novel about learning and self discovery. Epstein and Nicole are both seeking knowledge and contentment. It was really interesting to read about the history of Israel and the Jewish faith. This book is beautifully written and worth reading.

Forest Dark tells the stories of two people who go to Israel, attempting to transform their lives in some way, shedding their past. It is also about Kafka and Israel. These different stories of metamophosis (presumably a theme tied back to Kafka) run alternately through the narrative. At times, it is very beautifully written. Nicole writes wonderful descriptions of place and some ofher anecdotes in her characters lives are very evocative: the story of selling grandad's roses ostensibly for charity, but really to buy sweets, and then struggling with the guilt is one that really stood out for me. I can't honestly say that I followed the threads of the various stories, however. For me, the story was often lost amongst deep philosopical prose and historical facts and so I ended the novel not entirely sure what I'd been reading. I imagine someone with a better knowledge of Kafka and more nuanced interest in philosophy would enjoy it more.

Literary fiction .

This book is weighty it is important and it knows that .

The two narratives work the author gets her ideas out and dares the reader to interpret and think about their own life.

Impressive in scope and structure, yet rather frustrating. If you’re hoping for another History of Love, you’re likely to come away disappointed: while that book touched the heart; this one is mostly cerebral. Metafiction, the Kabbalah, and some alternative history featuring Kafka are a few of the major elements, so think about whether those topics attract or repel you. Looking deeper, this is a book about Jewish self-invention and reinvention, and in that respect is a bit more successful than Krauss’s ex-husband Jonathan Safran Foer’s uncannily similar contribution, Here I Am (a failing marriage, an old dog, a trip to Israel). She’s taken a page from Foer’s first book, though, in making one of her protagonists a Jewish writer named Nicole whose marriage is coming to an end. Blink and you’ll miss it: her name is given only once, at 19% in the Kindle book: “Nicole’s necklace, found in Hilton pool.”

There are two stories here: 1) Jules Epstein (his first name deliberately sounds like “Jews”) leaves everything behind – his reputation as a lawyer, his ex-wife and three grown children, the fortune he’s invested in works of art – to take up an ascetic life in Israel. His new ambitions are to plant 400,000 trees as a memorial forest in honor of his late parents and to fund a biopic of the life of King David, his ancestor. 2) While Epstein’s narrative is in the third person, Nicole is the first-person narrator of the alternating sections. She’s paralyzed by writer’s block and heads to Tel Aviv in search of inspiration, but instead finds herself caught up in a project to uncover the lost works of Kafka.

Now, when I read a novel with a dual narrative, especially when the two strands share a partial setting – here, the Tel Aviv Hilton – I fully expect them to meet up at some point. In Forest Dark that never happens. At least, I don’t think so, unless they do at the very end [(if Epstein is the man who jumps off the roof at the hotel just before Nicole leaves Israel, which may also be the same jumper she hears about towards the start of the novel – but I’m more inclined to think that he just disappears into the wilderness at the end of the book) (hide spoiler)] or they’ve been interlocked the whole time [(if Epstein’s story is what Nicole eventually sets down after she gets over her writer’s block) (hide spoiler)]. I was so desperately looking for a meet-up between the central characters and thought I’d found one at 53% – Aha! He’s stumbled on a young woman in a bathtub! That must be her! – but it turned out to be a false lead. Ultimately, I concluded that Jules Epstein and Nicole never met because [she was never actually in Israel: this was all her illness-induced hallucination, or her written fantasy of where she’d go and what she’d do if she wasn’t stuck in an imploding family situation (“the idea came to me of dreaming my life from the Hilton … having always been solidly somewhere, only dreaming of being lost”), meaning that this is a novel within a novel (hide spoiler)]. The only thing that undeniably links these characters, then, is that both find themselves in a Dantean dark wood (“forest dark” is the phrase used in the Longfellow translation of the opening of the Inferno) of doubt about life’s purpose, and have to decide what comes next.

My favorite subplot was about Kafka; my favorite passages were descriptions of the Israeli landscape; my favorite individual scenes were the mix-up about Epstein’s coat and Haroon’s screw-up with the painting, rare pinpricks of humor in an otherwise highly serious (worthy, to use a Briticism) novel. Overall I loved Epstein’s story line: it’s a picture of a biblical-style patriarch renouncing life’s pleasures. But put these elements together and you still don’t have a fully satisfactory novel, especially because I sometimes found the Nicole character almost insufferably clever and inward gazing.

All told, there’s a lot to think about in this novel: more questions than answers, really. If you don’t mind that in your fiction, you should be fine here. Just keep in mind that of Krauss’s previous novels, this is most like her first, Man Walks into a Room: dreamy, uncertain, highbrow. (Whereas I compared Here I Am to Howard Jacobson, I’d compare this to David Grossman – and Krauss-as-Nicole even uses the phrase “falling out of time,” one of his novel titles.) Interesting, for sure, but not the return to form I’d hoped for.

I am not averse to a bit of theology in my reading and Nicole Krauss has some interesting things to say about the Jewish faith and the Jews’ creation of their own myth and history.

‘…we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.’

‘…the Jew who aspires to cliché, who, in his pious fight against extinction is willing to become a copy of a copy of a copy. Epstein had seen them all of his life, the ones whose dark suits only highlight the fact that after so many mimeographs the ink has faded and blurred.’

I can take quite a lot of soul-searching, too, about marriages that have run their course and contemplation of lives well lived or not. In this book Nicole, a successful novelist, has stalled in her writing and her marriage. As this character says, ‘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 draw one closer to it’. My understanding is that her trip to Israel is an attempt to find herself and her voice, Epstein’s a desire to find a different purpose to his life.

Sublimely well written, if challengingly dense at times, I found much to admire in this book, not least a fascinating hypothesis about Kafka. For it to have worked for me as a novel, though, I’d have liked a more coherent plot and more engaging characters. Alternating between the first person (Nicole) and the third person (Epstein), their stories run in parallel and don’t complement each other in the way I’d hoped they might. Probably my fault and I missed something. Certainly by the time I had read to the end it seemed that a great deal of heavy stuff had washed over me and left me feeling simply cold. I had pretty much lost interest in the outcome for either of the characters - a shame as it left me feeling dissatisfied with the whole experience. I can’t think of anyone I’d be likely to recommend this to so three stars from me, mostly for the quality of the writing.

**I'll publish this on goodreads closer to publication date**

I absolutely loved bits of this novel which kept me going through the long, convoluted passages which didn't really seem to be going anywhere. Some good characterisation and beautiful writing but all in all just too dull.

I really struggled with this. The switch between voices jarred and a day on from finishing I'd be hard put to explain to you what the actual plot was. Very worthy but not entertaining.

Some books are difficult to review and this is one of these. Some are hard to keep reading too and I toiled with this,eventually giving up. The characters are well drawn and the language flows well but it is not really a story at all. Too much of it is the lead figures' idiosyncrasies and philosophising.

I made it to 40%, most of which was a struggle, but then I had to stop. Most reviews for this book are very positive & like another reviewer has pointed out, perhaps if I had a background in or deeper understanding of Judaism, I may have been more engaged.
Epstein I just didn't feel was at all believable or well portrayed, I got no sense of his personality. We are just 'told' he is x y z. Nicole I cared more about & the writing about her failing marriage showed that this authored is skilled.
Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for a book that felt more like an essay, or at times even, a lecture.

I'm not entirely sure why I requested this book as it wasn't the type of read I enjoy. It was somewhat too philosophical for me. It started promisingly but the lack of storyline didn't keep me involved. Not for me, sorry.