Forest Dark - Nicole Krauss

. .

Résumé :
Jules Epstein has vanished from the world. Last seen when a taxi dropped him off in the Judean foothills, Epstein was a man whose outsize personality had, for sixty-eight years, been a force to be reckoned with.

Five months earlier, in New York, Epstein - following his parents' deaths, his divorce and his retirement - is undergoing a transformation. Feeling an irresistible longing for lightness, he begins to give his possessions away, including his art collection. Travelling to Tel Aviv, Epstein checks into the Hilton with a vague plan to do something in his parents' memory, but is soon side-tracked by an encounter with a rabbi with mystical beliefs.

At the same time, an American novelist in refuge from family life arrives at the Hilton, consumed by the idea that the hotel might be the key to unlocking a dimension of reality previously closed to her. But when a retired professor of literature offers her the task of completing an unfinished script by Franz Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will change her in unimaginable ways.

Bursting with life, humour and passion, this is a profound, mesmerizing, achingly beautiful novel of metamorphosis and self-realisation; of looking beyond all that is visible towards the infinite.

Biographie:
Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the National Book Award, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger, and was shortlisted for the Orange, M?dicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007 she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by the New Yorker for their 'Twenty Under Forty' list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

nicolekrauss.com