Review by New York Times Review
THE GREAT QUAKE: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet, by Henry Fountain. (Broadway, $16.) In 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake - the second strongest in history - rocked Alaska. In one town, the resulting tidal wave swept away a third of the residents. Fountain, a climate reporter for The Times, describes the aftereffects, including the rise of the study of plate tectonics. CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $17.) Frances and Bobbi, two young writers in Dublin, are more than best friends: they're each other's editors and confidantes. Frances's affair with Nick, the husband of an older photographer whom the women befriend, sets their relationship adrift. The novel gives a satisfying voice to an intellectual, complex female friendship. THE LAST CASTLE: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation's Largest Home, by Denise Kieman. (Touchstone, $17.) At 175,000 square feet, the Biltmore estate in Asheville, N.C., was the largest private home in the country when it was completed in 1895 by a Vanderbilt heir. Kieman trains a wide lens on Gilded Age America, particularly after the 1929 stock market crash imperiled the family's fortunes. FOREST DARK, by Nicole Krauss. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Two successful Americans - a celebrated but stalled writer, and an older lawyer - return to Israel to reconcile their divided selves. Krauss's illuminating novel toys with questions of identity that resist easy answers. The book centers on characters who "have it all but nonetheless have begun to wander aimlessly across their own lives," our reviewer, Peter Orner, wrote. "Israel, impossible and messy as it is, becomes a conduit for new possibilities." RANGER GAMES: A True Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime, by Ben Blum. (Anchor, $16.95.) What drove the author's cousin, an Army Ranger, to participate in a robbery days before his deployment to Iraq? As Blum investigates, examining his cousin's gauzy explanations, his story becomes a meditation on social coercion, the limits of human agency and his family's improbable kindred spirits. NEW PEOPLE, by Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $16.) It's New York in the '90s, and Maria and Khalil, college sweethearts from Stanford, appear to be a mixed-race poster couple; together, "they look like the end of a story." Our critic Parul Sehgal praised this funny and sinister novel, which riffs on Senna's hallmark themes: "what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home - and under the skin."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Krauss' entrancing and mysterious novel follows the strange journeys of two secular American Jews in Israel who are nearly hijacked by two fervent visionaries on missions of either discovery or delusion. Epstein is a man of means, power, and accomplishment who is baffling his staff and grown children by giving away his carefully acquired treasures and withdrawing from his life. Nicole, a writer unable to write and whose marriage is faltering, often feels as though she's in two places at once as she thinks about the multiverse theory and her sharp childhood memories of the monolithic Tel Aviv Hilton. Epstein is taken up by a rabbi planning a gathering of the descendants of King David. Nicole comes under the spell of an alleged friend of a cousin who recounts a wild story about Kafka's secret life in Palestine, which Krauss ties to a hilarious and poignant take on the real-life battle in Israel over Kafka's papers. As both seekers end up alone in the desert, Epstein in ecstasy, Nicole in wonder-struck peril, Krauss reflects with singing emotion and sagacity on Jewish history; war; the ancient, plundered forests of the Middle East; and the paradoxes of being. A resounding look at the enigmas of the self and the persistence of the past.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Krauss's elegant, provocative, and mesmerizing novel is her best yet. Rich in profound insights and emotional resonance, it follows two characters on their paths to self-realization. In present-day Israel, two visiting Americans-one a young wife, mother, and novelist, the other an elderly philanthropist-experience transcendence. In alternating chapters, Krauss (The History of Love) first presents Jules Epstein, a high-powered retired Manhattan lawyer whose relentless energy has dimmed with his recent divorce, the death of his parents, and an inchoate desire to divest himself of the chattels of his existence. A change of POV introduces a narrator-a Brooklyn resident named Nicole who has a failing marriage, two young children, and writer's block. Both Jules and Nicole are vulnerable to despair and loss of faith, and trust in conventional beliefs. Although they never meet, similar existential crises bring them to Tel Aviv, where each is guided by a mysterious Israeli and experiences glimpses of a surreal world where they feel their true identities lie. A charismatic rabbi, Menachem Klausner, claims that Jules is a descendant of King David. Meanwhile, Nicole is lured into meeting Eliezer Friedman, a retired literature professor and perhaps an ex-Mossad agent who attempts to convince Nicole of a preposterous but increasingly alluring idea: that Franz Kafka didn't die in Prague but secretly was smuggled into Israel. He wants Nicole to write about the hidden life of this famous literary figure. Nicole's conversations with Friedman and Epstein's with Klausner about God and the creation of the world are bracingly intellectual and metaphysical. Vivid, intelligent, and often humorous, this novel is a fascinating tour de force. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Krauss's (The Great House) first novel in seven years, two untethered American Jews experience parallel epic quests in Israel. One will die, the other will be transformed. The story is told in alternating chapters, and the pair never meet. Jules Epstein, a Manhattan lawyer so rich he can hang a "small Matisse" in his closet, at 68 is quickly divesting himself of his wealth. Nicole, who isn't given a last name, is the mother of two young sons, stagnating in a failed marriage in Brooklyn; she's convinced visiting the Tel Aviv Hilton of her youth will lift her writer's block. Both arrive in Israel seeking: Jules follows an enigmatic rabbi, eventually landing on the set of a King David documentary; Nicole endures a wild chase initiated by her cousin's alleged professor friend to discover Franz Kafka's purported Palestinian papers. With nuanced agility, Gabra Zackman voices the entire cast, matching gender, age, even national and regional accents. Her adaptability grounds Krauss's often ephemeral, surreal narrative, alchemizing the very "magic of that discordance" that is Krauss's examination of love, loss, and the fluidity of identity, into accessibly resonating storytelling. VERDICT Libraries should be well prepared in all formats for devoted patron demand. ["Wildly imaginative, darkly humorous, and deeply personal, this novel seems to question the very nature of time and space. Krauss commands our attention, and serious readers will applaud": LJ 7/17 starred review of the Harper hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two American visitors to Israel undergo separate but similar metamorphoses in this cerebral novel by Krauss (Great House, 2010, etc.).As the story opens, Jules Epstein, a wealthy retired divorc, has gone missing in Israel, leaving behind a host of questions: why did he trade in his Fifth Avenue apartment for a decrepit seaside hovel? Why did he choose to spend a chunk of his fortune to help fund a biopic about King David? And what prompted the "slow unfurling of self-knowledge" that led him to abandon his well-off life? Meanwhile, in an alternate set of chapters, an unnamed young novelist has come to the Tel Aviv Hilton hoping to kick-start her next book and escape her crumbling marriage. There, she's contacted by a man soliciting her help on a film based on an unpublished Kafka play and who also has some hard-to-believe news to deliver about Kafka himself. Jules and the novelist never directly connect, but they share similar existential predicaments: both are struggling to reconcile American and Israeli cultures and wrestle with religious and philosophical questions. Jules falls under the spell of a rabbi who opines on the connection between global and personal transformation, while the novelist revisits Kafka and Freud's concept of unheimlich, a sort of world-weary anxiety and dread. Krauss, as ever, writes beautifully about complex themes, and she has a keen eye for the way Israel's culture, slower but more alert to violence, requires its American characters to reboot their perceptions. Her big questions don't always provoke big effects, though, and much of the drama she establishes for her two characters feels dry, with her riffs on Kafka and Judaism more essayistic than novelistic. And though the novel never promised high drama, its low boil makes it harder to inspire the reader to draw connections within her braided narrative. An ambitiously high-concept tale that mainly idles in a contemplative register. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
