Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
The Custom of the Country
By Louis Begley
The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Norton, 255 pp., $23.95
Nicole Krauss's first novel, Man Walks into a Room, published in 2002 when she was twenty-eight, begins as an astute portrayal of an Upper West Side couple, a Columbia University professor and his social worker wife, whose lives are shattered after the husband undergoes an operation to remove a tumor from his brain. The husband remembers nothing that happened to him after the age of twelve but his cognitive faculties are left intact. Nevertheless, he allows himself to be recruited for a project that is designed to enable people to 'communicate and share more clearly,' and attain 'true empathy' by transferring one person's memories to another. At this point, the book turns into grade-B science fiction. Nicole Krauss is also a poet and has been short-listed for the Yale Younger Poets' Prize, and has been named by The New Yorker as one of the best of young American writers.
Review, 4369 words
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