Man Walks Into a Room

Samson Greene has a problem. A tumor the size of a cherry has created a pronounced amnesia, eradicating his memories past the age of twelve. The thirty-six-year-old Columbia University English professor is found one day wandering the desert outside of Las Vegas, and when the tumor is discovered and removed, his wife, Anna, brings him back to New York and his "life." Try though he may, Samson, cannot connect to anything, and eventually finds himself lured back to the desert by a charismatic scientist who promises to restore memories, though not his own. Anna is never far from Samson's thoughts, as he puzzles over how he could have loved so deeply a woman who is now a stranger. When the testing goes awry, he flees to Santa Cruz, in search of the grave of his mother, who he has never known to be dead. As we follow Samson on his journey, we feel his sharp pains and dull grief as he mourns a life well-lived and profoundly forgotten.

Much like early DeLillo, Nicole Krauss's sharp, intelligent storytelling effortlessly peels away the layers of quotidian circumstances to reveal the subtle joys and woes of simple survival. She creates in Samson Greene an ordinary man with gritty poignancy, whose heroism is blanketed in a newly born empathy.