Guest of the ilb 2004
Nicole Krauss
was born in New York, USA, in 1974. She studied English
Literature at Stanford University in California and at Oxford
University in the UK, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She then
went on to study at London’s Courtauld Institute, where she wrote her
Master’s thesis on Rembrandt. From early on she admired the
poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Joseph Brodsky,
with whom she had a regular correspondence. During her studies
she published poems in various British journals. In 1999 she
produced a radio portrait about Brodsky for the BBC. She founded
and organised a series of readings at the New York restaurant 'The
Russian Samovar' in which numerous writers – among them John Ashbery,
Susan Sontag, Derek Walcott, and Jonathan Franzen – took part.
The conflict of memory is of great importance in Krauss’s work.
Her Jewish grandparents left Europe in time before the war, while
other family members perished in the Holocaust. Her debut novel,
'Man Walks into a Room' (2002), also deals with identity, memory and
its loss. Samson Greene, a thirty-six year old Literature
professor, is found wandering disoriented through the Nevada
desert. The removal of a small brain tumor saves his life, but
his memories beyond the age of twelve are permanently lost. It is
the story of an intelligent, sensitive man returned to a world in which
everything is strange and new. At first he meets his condition
with confusion, then, as a kind of liberation. When a charismatic
scientist asks Samson to participate in a bold experiment, he agrees.
In this novel, Nicole Krauss grapples with the emotional,
scientific, historical, religious and literary facets of oblivion and
remembrance. Critics were especially impressed by the conciseness
of her literary images and the perspicacious representation of such
complex themes. Her first short story, 'Future Emergencies', was
published in 'Esquire' magazine in 2002, and was contained in the
anthology Best American Short Stories 2003. Her novel, 'The
History of Love', was excerpted in "The New Yorker". Nicole Krauss
worked as a columnist for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", and
both she and her husband, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer, are
currently guests of the American Academy in Berlin. They live in New
York.
© international literature festival berlin
| 
