Characters seek transformation on a beguiling, brilliant journey
Nicole Krauss’s fourth novel tackles the idea of metamorphosis head-on, with masterful results
If there were any doubts as to whether Nicole Krauss should be considered among the first rank of American novelists, and there really shouldn’t have been after her stunning sophomore effort, The History of Love, and its mesmerizing followup, Great House, her fourth, the beguiling, brilliant and at times very funny Forest Dark, should lay them firmly to rest.
Like those earlier novels, Forest Dark focuses its gaze on seemingly disparate individuals. In this case, Jules Epstein, a very successful and recently retired New York lawyer who, in an apparent crisis of conscience, divorces his wife of 30-odd years and, to the chagrin of his children, gives away his considerable fortune before travelling to Israel with no clearer purpose than a vague notion of somehow honouring his recently deceased parents.
As well as Jules, there is Nicole, a successful but blocked novelist who is experiencing her own emotional crisis, which has her feeling as if she “might possibly be inhabiting two separate planes of existence.”
With her marriage crumbling and her writing stalled, she, like Jules, feels al- most inexplicably drawn to Israel.
They both end up, though at different times, ensconced in the Tel Aviv Hilton, that “massive concrete rectangle on stilts that dominates the Tel Aviv coast.” From there, they set about trying to navigate the “forest dark” — Krauss takes her title from the opening canto of Dante’s Inferno — in which each is waylaid.
In an interview with England’s Guardian newspaper, Krauss said that “the self is more or less an invention from beginning to end.”
In Forest Dark, Jules and Nicole are very much trying to recreate themselves, to transform who they are.
Each is guided by their own curious Tzaddik of sorts: Jules by the idiosyncratic Rabbi Klauser, a man trying to reunite the descendants of the biblical King David, and Nicole by the mysterious Eliezer Friedman, retired academic and rumoured Mossad agent, who reveals a startling secret about Franz Kafka and sets her an almost impossible literary task.
The Hebraic concept of gilgul, which speaks of “the continuity of the soul through different material realities,” is a notion that Krauss has explored in the past. But with Forest Dark, she tackles this idea of metamorphosis head-on and the result is simply masterful. Stephen Finucan is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Toronto.