Tale of entangled destinies
THE Tel Aviv Hilton looms in Nicole Krauss’s latest novel Forest Dark. Two seemingly unrelated Americans leave their lives behind to find clarity at the Mediterranean hotel that has been the backdrop to many of their past travels.
Self-made man Jules Epsteinbegins to undo the life he sculpted by divorcing his wife and auctioning off his tasteful eclecticisms. An unnamed novelist hopes that the hotel pool whose depths held her happiness as a child will recharge her writing as she makes her personal pilgrimage to the Hilton. Epstein’s journey becomes tangled with a persistent rabbi whom he encounters during his last day in New York and by chance is on the same flight to Israel.
Elsewhere and in a way, never far off, the novelist is at odds with Franz Kafka who materialises through a mysterious retired professor of literature. The supposed professor capitalises on the novelist’s state of limbo and lures her into a venture involving Kafka’s presence in the Middle East.
Forest Dark puts enigma centre stage as the novel backtracks from Epstein’s eventual disappearance: “A cockroach strutted majestically across the stone floor. Only after the police detective stomped on it with his shoe did it occur to Maya, Epstein’s youngest and most intelligent child, that it may have been the last to see her father.”
Krauss’s two tales of one city is an immersive negotiation of complex issues. The intelligence with which the protagonists navigate their worlds is intoxicating.
The slow brooding pace of the novel is testament to Krauss setting it in the Middle East. As the novelist eloquently writes of an encounter with a taxi driver in Tel Aviv: “America is a place with no time on its hands, but in the Middle East there is time, and so the world gets more looked at there, opinions are formed about what is seen, and naturally opinions are different, so that an abundance of time, in a certain equation, leads to argument.”
However, the intensely pensive prose does tend to ramble at times and consequently wards off drama from driving the story. This is alleviated on occasion through the expert transferral of narrative between chapters as the novelist’s ongoing story, written in a deeply personally shaded first person perspective, gives way to Epstein’s fantastical tale.
The contrasting angles make for a refreshing encounter. Throughout the novel the reader is made aware of subtle internal shifts within the characters as they are changed through their circumstances in the land that holds vastly different spiritual meaning to each.
Ultimately, Krauss’s strong novel comfortably places itself among the momentous questions of humanity and explores them through a superbly human lens.