Man Walks Into a Room

At the age of 36, what do you have left if you have lost all of your memories beyond your 12th year of life?This is the premise of Krauss's first novel, as she explores the importance of memory to our individual identity, and the lonely freedom that can come after losing them. Her beautiful prose and ability to develop empathetic characters make this book one that resonates long after you close the book.Haunting and gorgeous.

The perfect post-modernism novel. What would it be like to have another person's memory? This novel explores memory loss, shared memory and how we connect with people in the world. A first rate book to be sure. I love Kraus' use of language and found myself underlining much of the book.

Who would you be if you were unable to remember anything from the last 24 years? Sampson is found wandering in the Nevada desert with absolutely no recollection of his teen or adult years, including his relationship to his wife, whom he apparently loved very much. With his blank slate of a mind, he is recruited to be part of a cutting edge research project, but the understanding he hoped for remained elusive. His attempts to reinvent himself take him on a cross-country journey of discovery.

I so adored History of Love, and I was looking forward to this novel, but it did not live up to expectations. I really enjoyed the first part; what would it be like to forget your entire adolescent/adult life, but the rest was a bit of a let-down. This book is worth reading, but it will not thrill you like her second novel will!

I loved this book. Nicole Krauss's first novel, MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM (2002), is an amazing read. The kind of story that will take hold of your imagination and keep you thinking about it long after you've put the book down. It's a story about so many things: about memory, about atomic testing, about brain surgery, about mind-altering experiments and memory transfers. But perhaps more than anything else it's about the devastating effects of loneliness. Because Samson Greene is a man who has lost two-thirds of his life's memories. Thirty-six, following surgery to remove a tumor, he can only remember the first twelve years of his life. His marriage is one of the most notable casualties. The thing is, he seems to choose the blankness of losing the past two dozen years. He doesn't even try to recover his lost memories. He walks away from his wife and from his life and career as an English professor at Columbia in New York. He becomes part of an ill-defined bizarre experiment in memory transfers being conducted in a remote lab in the Nevada desert by a charismatic and amoral neuroscientist. And having "used" Samson, this guy simply cuts him loose, leaving him feeling "betrayed ... His mind had been violated in a way that no one else's ever had. The loneliness was savage.""But he hadn't lost his mind. To the contrary, he'd lost everything BUT. His memory, his wife, his job, his friends, twenty-four years of his life - but not his mind."Indeed the book's title summons up the first line of numerous bad jokes, and what has happened to Samson Greene is certainly the worst possible kind of joke. Got your attention? Well, it sure got mine, and "toot sweet." Because this is one hell of a yarn, full of twists, turns and tidbits of wisdom one would not normally expect from an author so young, not yet thirty when she wrote it. Now I've gotta find out what else this Nicole Krauss has written. This one though, it's just damn good. I highly recommend it.

Beautifully written exploration into the subject that memory makes us who we are and without it we are incomplete beings.Samson is found wandering in the Nevada desert and has no idea who he is. It happens that he has a benign brain tumor. After it’s removed, he is returned to his wife of 10 years, Anna, and she takes him home to NYC with the hope that his memory may return beyond what he's retained up until age 12, and the present memories that he’s creating.To Samson, Anna is a perfect stranger; he has no idea how to love someone, let alone his "former" wife; he has no desire to re-create his past in terms of reconnecting with old friends or re-engaging in his teaching position at a local university. However, he goes one day and encounters Lana, a student of his with whom he begins a relationship. His relationship with Anna is deteriorating. There is no level on which they connect, no ability for him to create feelings that he hasn’t re-learned to have. So, unable to pick up the thread of their lives together, they separate and Samson moves out to live with his lover.After a brief hiatus in Lana’s aptartment while she’s in LA, Samson begins a new life as a guinea pig at Dr. Ray’s neuroscience lab in the Mojave desert where Ray is trying to collect memories from donor subjects and insert them into the minds of recipient subjects.While in residence, Samson attaches himself to Donald, an older man whose memory of being a young soldier who witnessed an atomic blast in the Nevada desert Samson is destined to receive -- with devastating consequences.This is an elegiac, deeply explored, and philosophical journey into an annihilated mind. A good as well as a meaningful book. Read this for a rich literary experience and for the joy of solid writing and understanding of the fragile nature of maintaining a normal that can so easily be destroyed by happenstance and acts of man.

What a wonderful book....

What if a brain tumor causes you to lose all memories of your life after the age of 12? That's what happened to Samson Greene. One day he's an English professor at Columbia University and the next, he's found wandering in the Nevada desert, with no memory of his name, what he's doing in the desert, that he's married, who his friends are, and that his mother's dead.After the tumor has been removed, Samson has to deal with living in a house he doesn't remember, a wife he doesn't recognize and a life he doesn't want. But he adjusts, makes a new friend in an ex-student and a doctor, and finds he is actually comfortable with the lapse in his memory. He feels no need to try and get those memories back. He decides to participate in a cutting edge research conducted by a neurological scientist out in Nevada, and at the center, he meets Donald, an elderly eccentric, with whom he builds a bond. But his complacency takes him into unchartered waters at the research facility and he is finally jolted into taking steps to get some control over his life back again.

it did not work for me, i am afraid, but krauss' language is interesting as she lures you into turning those pages to read about things lost or never found, about whether and how they matter: "Give yourself time. It's a tragic thing to lose someone, whatever the circumstances. But it's amazing how resilient people are. Sure, it's hard to believe now, but one day you'll both wake up and realize it's all right. You'll open your eyes, and maybe the light will strike you in a certain way, and you'll sit up and think to yourself, okay."

Any book that makes you think about life and the people you share it with is worth reading. It drug me back into my childhood memories, it made me think ahead to when I was in my own Fairview Homes, it made me reflect on the memories I do share with people around me and the powerful memories I hold for myself, it made me think of my grandfather that saw a test blast himself, it made me want to take action against my loneliness, it made me want to talk to strangers on the bus. And along the way, I enjoyed Nicole Krauss' imagery and poetry.

I must have missed something in this book. There was a quote from Entertainment Weekly at the very top of the cover of my book that said “casually dazzling…thoroughly riveting.” Was I even reading the same book? Frankly, I found my book boring and wished it would all end sooner rather than later. I kept hoping for a resolution or some action to make my reading more worthwhile.The story is of Samson, a young man who had a brain tumor removed. The surgery resulted in memory loss of things that occurred to him after the age of twelve years. When Samson recovered from the surgery, his wife took him home. Unfortunately, it was a home that he no longer knew and a wife with whom he was no longer the least bit familiar. He needed to make a decision whether to stay or whether to leave and, if he left, to where should he turn.I didn’t find much of interest in his experiences nor in the people he met in his travels. I did, however, like his great-uncle Max, but I was not treated to his company very long. Oddly enough there were a few quirks about this book that I did like, but not enough for me to give this novel a recommendation. I thought it interesting that the main character was Jewish even though that had nothing to do with the story. In addition, the author’s writing style is easy to read. I only wish that her story would have been more fun to read.

I can't say I love Man Walks Into a Room as much as The History of Love. The idea of the book is great, but I couldn't relate to the main character. Also, the second part of the book feels very fantasy-ish, which I didn't expect at all. I hope that Nicole Krauss's books will keep getting better, then she will rise on my favorites list!

While Man Walks Into a Room was Nicole Krauss's debut novel, I was first brought to experience her genius in The History of Love. Her first work feels like less of a novel and more like a lengthy short story -- though, to its credit, it certainly doesn't feel any longer than a short story. Instead, it's more of a lingering discussion on an idea that begs to be explored. As a result, it feels hard to summarize the plot in a tantalizing way beyond the initial scenario, as a large part of the novel is really a reaction to just that.Samson Greene is found wandering the desert outside of Las Vegas eight days after going missing in Manhattan. Almost immediately, he undergoes surgery to remove a newly discovered brain tumor and when he wakes up, he has no memory of his life after the age of twelve. No memory of his loving wife, his career as an English professor at Columbia University, his friends, his dog, his mother's death... nothing. Remarkably, he appears able to make new memories and is still an intelligent and functioning adult, but the slate appears to have been wiped clean of over twenty years of experiences. Without any connection to this life, he doesn't particularly feel a desperate need for these memories to return so much as he just wants everyone to stop looking at him with expectation. This is an unusual response to memory loss and is incredibly painful for Anna, his wife, who just wants her husband back, intact, with memories of their ten years spent together. As he adjusts to this new world (though thankfully we are spared the movie "Big" ideas and he seems to have the mentality of an adult if not the personal memories), he struggles to establish a relationship with Anna and find some purpose to his own self. Unsurprisingly, things do not go well. Samson retreats further into himself as he realizes he cannot really make Anna happy, developing a strange friendship with a former student and relying on the companionship of his dog, Frank, who does not expect Samson to remember their time together. This is all moving along when Krauss throws in a bit of a twist: a neuro-scientist offers Samson the opportunity to take part in a hushed-up memory experiment and Samson quickly signs up. The experiment does not claim that it could return his memories, for those are lost for good, but instead the experiment is attempting something much more revolutionary and potentially much more traumatizing. Of course, if one picks up the novel and reads the very first few pages, one might wonder how the depiction of a young soldier witnessing an atomic bomb testing plays into the rest of the story. It is this memory that will hit Samson with all its atomic force, finally breaking him open to understand everything that has befallen him. It takes the story a while to get there, but impact is astounding.As I mentioned, this novel is not one that should be read for plotlines; it's the exploration of a "what if...?" idea. From the beginning, you should be pretty aware that everything cannot end well. It might end not terribly, but that's about all you can hope for after a tragedy that takes someone from those he loves without actually killing him. Indeed, as characters wonder in the story, would Samson's death have been preferable to wiping his memories but leaving him standing? For a large part, I enjoyed the awkward and painful examination of what to do with this man who has been cut from the ties of his life, yes remains floating around. It's believable and heartbreaking, which is a hard emotion to muster when it comes towards the beginning of a novel and you have not really had time to get to know your characters. Your sympathy focuses mainly on Anna, the "widow" who is told to act against her hopes, to smother her desire that the Samson she knows will return to love her, and to simply help him adjust to his new life as a helpmate rather than a loving wife. Even though Samson is the one to experience the memory loss, he has no real remorse for something he has no attachment to in his present condition, so it's Anna who has experienced the real tragedy.... though Samson does come to understand his loss, in a way. Once we arrive at the memory experiment, things change a bit. Krauss is not interested in creating a science-fiction epic, though its aim to graft the memories from one person to another is rather fearsome in its implications. She uses this experiment as an opportunity to give Samson new ties and to allow him to explore his loss and the burden of what he gains. Krauss is simply exploring the trajectory of a lost soul... what one might do in today's day and age if completely unanchored from the life they knew and yet somehow still inhabiting the shell of it. Strangely, if there were kids involved, Samson might have felt obliged to make more of an effort at rekindling a relationship with Anna. He trusts her because she's there but perhaps he does love her after all, if he would only open himself up to the idea. Instead, he struggles to find his own way, feeling untethered and yet concerned for Anna's welfare and future. Whether this springs from the knowledge that she tried to reorient him to the world, the fact that she seems so terribly hurt by what has happened to Samson, or a growing/returning love for this woman... well, without memories to understand one's motivations, perhaps everything is wrapped up together. By removing us from the story arch that might define more conventional novels, Krauss achieves a dreamlike state of wandering exploration... perhaps a more pleasant version of what Samson might feel as he suddenly finds himself as a thirty-something year old man with no knowledge of the twenty-odd years that led to his current state. It's haunting and painful, causing readers to question how they might react in similar circumstances, and ultimately having to accept that there is no way to know, as the person one now is would no longer exist without the last two thirds of one's life to shape him/her.Nicole Krauss writes with such beauty that I now know I'll read anything she publishes. I might not push Man Walks Into a Room on anyone with the same passion as I did The History of Love, but I still think it's a lovely work of incredible quality. Reviews that I've read online have lamented that the ending doesn't seem to bring any real closure or epiphany, but then, the situation hardly suggests that there will ever really be closure. As for an epiphany, well, quite honestly the understanding that life continues on seems to be a rather painful and yet hard-won moral. It may not be the ending that one wants, but such is life.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book, now that I am through with it. I am convinced that Nicole Krauss is a marvelous writer. Of that, there is no doubt. But I never fully engaged in the story here. Part of that is Samson's fault, though. I don't think he fully engaged in his story either. The ending came abruptly -- a rapid change of pace, with the epilogue in a different character voice which left me disorientated. (Ha! Just a note to add that I, too, find the use of this word distracting. It appeared in two books I was reading on the same day, and startled me both times. It led to a flurry of emails to my grammar goddess, Antof9, with the query "Two separate books within 12 hours. Is it a real word? What happened to disoriented? And how do they differ?" She told me "File it under 'those crazy Brits'. Here's a very entertaining bulletin board on the topic: We don't use it. We say disoriented. Or "confused", as one poster on that bulletin board noted :)") And on p 144, when Donald says "Palmolive, take me away", I also was distracted. Was it Palmolive rather than Calgon, because of his character, or because of poor editing? Sometimes, I think too much. Anyhow, the premise of the story both captured and scared me. One of my biggest fears is the loss of my beloved. (I have told him that if he dies before me, I'll kill him.) To think about totally losing your loved one, but to have him physically still on the earth, lost to you by loss of memory, is shattering. I almost think that divorce would be easier, because your past together still exists in more than your own mind. There is a shared history.One passage made me very sad, mostly because I am a parent and hope this hasn't happened for my son. Pip is talking about her experiences in India, watching the scattering of ashes in the Ganges, while downstream people collect drinking water, and she thought "...is that safe? Aren't they going to catch some awful disease? And then you go back to the room you share with like ten other people and you get into your dirty bed and cry, because you realize your probably never going to be that spiritually enlightened that you stop caring about germs and disease and just trust the power of Brahman. Because you grew up in America in a nice clean house with parents that tried to shelter you but ended up fucking you up, and you'll always be branded with that."Is it so bad to want to provide protection for a child? To know about disease prevention and staying healthy? Surely if we are temples to God, and if God, however you chose to define the concept, lives within us, then keeping that home clean and safe isn't a bad thing, is it? I will ponder this book a bit more. Again, I thought the writing quite fine, and overall the book was good. It just left me with more questions than answers. Sometimes that's a good thing, though. One should read to expand the mind, not just for entertainment.

I wish Nicole Krauss had written this book AFTER History of Love. A more mature author would have fulfilled the potential of this story and removed the sci-fi element that is reducing the believability of story and characters. It is nevertheless a readable book; Krauss is one of the more exciting young writers from the U.S., and it is well-crafted with some memorable scenes and quotes.

The History of Love by this author, Nicole Krauss, is one of my favorite books. Man Walks Into a Room was her first book. I didn't expect to like it as much as the History of Love, and I didn't, but it was good. Her way of writing makes it hard to stop reading, she has a way of saying things that make you stop and think. I defanitley turned back to read paragraphs and phrases in this book as I did in the other, though not as often. I would recommend this book if for no other reason than just to experience the story itself. I don't want to give anything away, I think its one of those that if you dont know what it is it makes it even better, but the story is original and intriguing.

Not sure about this book. The idea of someone losing his memory was interesting, but I did not like the way it was elaborated on in the story. The book was much more boring than I expected. The best bit was the end, where the main character meets his old greatuncle, who is the only person left who knew him when young. It turns out that the greatuncle does not remember him! He also only remembers things form early on in his life, not unlike the main character. So there was a nice parallel there.

Man Walks into a Room begins with an intriguing premise -- a successful, married university professor loses his memory to a brain tumor. Unable to remember anything after the age of 12, Samson Greene struggles to connect with his wife Anna and find a place in the world. Unfortunately, the book just never quite comes together.

I didn't love this book as much as I did The History of Love, but I did really, really like it. I found Krauss's thoughts about memory fascinating. And Samson Greene's story was compelling enough that I had a hard time putting the book down.