- [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by claire and carl stuart. i'm evan smith, she's a best-selling, award-winning novelist who's previous books include the history of love and great house, her latest, forest dark, has just been published. she is nicole krauss, this is overheard. (audience clapping) let's be honest, is this about your ability to learn or is this about the experience of not having been taught properly. how have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa and-- you could say that he'd made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. you know, you saw a problem and over time, took it on-- let's start with the sizzle before we get to the steak. are you gonna run for president? i think i just got an f from you actually. this is over. (audience clapping) nicole krauss, welcome. thank you. congratulations on this book, it's a wonderful read. thank you very much.

the thing that i take away from it is really the thing at the end, after you read the story and you're kind of contemplating the meaning of it all, here is this note from you, the author, a couple paragraphs explaining the genesis of the title. and it's the henry longfellow translation of dante's inferno, which i gather, i'm not a scholar on dante's inferno, but i know that this is not the most popular translation, is that right? right. and so you are citing this as the origin of the title, and it goes, if i can remember this, "it's midway upon the journey of our life, "i found myself within a forest dark, "for the straightforward pathway had been lost." so look at that, i memorized that. well done. it's a very elegant phrasing, and the concept of the forest dark obviously is-- yeah. you know, i find that translation particularly beautiful because it keeps the original order of the italian,

so selva oscura, and you normally see that translated either as dark wood or dark forest. but there's something about keeping that original forest dark. forest dark. which i think is much more evocative, so i chose that translation for that reason. but it was interesting, it's a title that leapt out at me long after i finished the book at the stage where the publisher was already saying, we need a title, come on. so that was not the intent from the very beginning? no, i didn't have a title for a long time. had you chosen that longfellow passage as an inspiration for this book? no, no, i hadn't. so you came to it at the end? i came to it at the end, i came to it, and once i came to it, i knew it was perfect. because of course this is a book about two characters who leave the straightforward path who do become lost in metaphorical forests.

and at least for one of them, you know, there's a character, jules epstein, who ends up planting this forest in the desert of israel and the other character, nicole, very early on in the book talks about, she's talking really about the idea of her problem with descartes and a world based on rational knowledge of the individual. and she says every time i read this line that descartes wrote about finding a straightforward path out of the forest, i think i wanna get lost in that forest. how is it possible that you did not have this translation before? it's like you said, i've written this book, i need to google forest and straightforward path and see what comes up, oh look, right. my explanation for that and for so many of the other truly mysterious things that happened over the course of writing a novel over many years were suddenly you understand why you had that early line or scene, or two things come together that you didn't see they were about to come together

and they do, and they make the book work. my explanation for that is either we can say creativity is a deeply mysterious process that is very hard to explain about putting oneself in touch with enigmas, the unknown, or i can give you a more sort of scientific explanation for it and say well when we read neuroscience, if we read for example a book about the brain by oliver sacks, what we learn about memory is that we all forget things. we all absorb from the world, we assimilate the things that we heard, that we read, and bit by bit we kind of forget those things and the origin of them, we forget the source. they settle down into our unconscious and people who are writers or artists i think what happens down in that layer of forgetting where things come from is that you weld it with what's yourself.

you weld it with what's original in you and then what comes out is the thing that you make. so of course i thought a lot about dante, i took a class on dante when i was in college. maybe this was not the first time you encountered it. no, no, of course not, not encountered it but certainly it was there in that dark place where one draws from when one lowers the bucket down in the well and pulls up whatever one's gonna write about and make something out of it. what's extraordinary, nicole, about this and about the fact that you came to this at the end and not the beginning is that thematically what is this book about? we're all in a forest dark, and we all discover to our dismay in some cases, and later than we intend to, that we're not on a straightforward path. and the characters in this book, jules epstein on the one hand, and nicole the novelist on the other hand, are both on paths that are not straightforward, and they both find themselves in forest dark, i mean that's why i think it's so, and i found myself staring at this thinking, god, this is perfect, and i wish i had had this at the beginning of the book

as opposed to the end so that it would be explanation as opposed to validation of my read. my high school english teacher would agree with you. he would? yes. he's one of my first readers, all these years later, of all of my novels and he read this book without its title and then i told him the title, i told him that i was going to put it in and he said i really think you should put that in the beginning. the very beginning. right, so let's go through a little more in detail about the story, so jules epstein is a wealthy lawyer in new york. yes. loses his parents, older man, late 60's, right? yes. loses his parents, makes the decision and marriage ends. makes the decision to give away his possessions, particularly his art collection, his matisse and other things, and goes to israel and checks into the tel aviv hilton. so he's on a journey of one sort, then there's a second narrative, parallel narrative, not intersecting but parallel narrative, a novelist named nicole who lives in brooklyn, has two kids, who's marriage is itself faltering,

who also goes overseas and checks into the tel aviv hilton. their journeys are constantly following the same physical grounds, they're moving from new york, they check into that ugly hotel which is on the cover of forest dark, the tel aviv hilton, and from there both of their stories kind of explode out into the desert in israel, but much more importantly to me, these two stories are constantly going over and following the same kind of metaphysical grounds. so not just physical, really same spiritual quest. and they're both, both jules epstein and nicole are trying in a sense to find the courage to leave behind those old forms of their lives, those old ways of being that in a sense no longer fit them. right so this is a book about transformation kafka is a big part, visible and invisible in the way that the book is written and imagined.

but even at a more simple level than just kafka, it is a book about people's lives being transformed. yeah, i mean jules epstein, who you described, wonderfully he is a man who all his life has been certain, a man of absolute authority in the world, a successful attorney, and in the wake of his parents' deaths because what an extraordinary thing to lose that which made you, to now be in the world without that which made you. in a sense he begins to think that deep question that sometimes comes up in our lives, no matter what age we are, what if i was wrong? what if i was wrong about the certainties on which i stake my life? and so late in life he begins slowly to kind of turn toward the unknown, i suppose you could say he turns toward that realm which he felt he neglected which is the opposite of the material realm, it's the spiritual realm. but there's something remarkable, because everybody goes through the experience of losing people close to them, not everybody

decides to kind of cleave themselves of all their possessions and make this extraordinary trip to discover what they are and who they are. yes, he catches what his lawyer calls the disease of radical charity, and he begins to give everything away but again there too although most people don't do it, i do think we live in a world where many of us feel we value the material far too much, and it isn't what life is about, and there is some yearning to let it all go, to let it all go and to become something else. to just shed all of that and be free, be lighter and think differently of the world. in that simplicity, discover who you actually are. discover who you are. and so he goes to israel, as you said, with that longing to do something, to find something he can do in his parents' memory and many things happen to him along the way. narrative one, jules epstein, narrative two, novelist named nicole, from brooklyn.

yes. with two kids. yes. in a marriage that is coming apart. yes, yes. everybody asks you about this. they do. you're messing with us, aren't you? i'm inviting you into what feels to me a really important question. in order to ask you that question i think i needed to use myself as a guinea pig. you acknowledge that nicole is to some degree you. she has the broad strokes of my life. absolutely has the broad strokes of my life. what happens to her, you mentioned kafka, we probably don't have time too much to get into exactly what-- there's always time for kafka, this is pbs. (laughing) my point is, the things that happen to nicole are so extraordinary that even if we know that she begins looking like me, we have to know that her story is fiction if you know anything about kafka, you know that her story is fiction.

what i'm asking, what i'm trying to provoke in the reader is basically this. i've been writing novels for 15 years now, i know that inside a book, when i'm writing a book, when you're reading a book, we have a sense of the self that is largely expansive. you're going to read the story of the history of love, we were just talking about the lines from leo gursky that you remembered, you become him in the act of reading the story about that old man. you identify with him, you pour your memory, your empathy, and who you are gains a facet of being, you grow, with each character you read, with each intimate life you step into in literature, with each landscape you live, you grow yourself. then you close the book or i as a writer leave my writing room after living these worlds, inventing these characters, and you go back, you pick up your kids from school, you do the shopping, you get to work, your sense of self kind of collapses down to i am who i am and i can't really change it too much. but actually we also know the self is a story,

it's a narrative that we've been telling since we were kids. maybe it started with your mother who said to you like you're like this and your brother's like this and then the story grows, and grows, and grows. but it is a narrative and we need to tell a story of who we are because that's what the brain needs, it needs coherence otherwise we don't know how to go through the world. the question i have is why don't we keep that sense of flexibility that we know we have when we enter into the world of literature or when we know we can expand ourselves, and grow ourselves, and be many, many things. why do we accept a story in this life, in reality, that is often maybe too small for us? it doesn't fit us anymore or we need more freedom, or we feel it's not accurate. i guess what i'm trying to say is in many ways we are a captain of those stories and they are expandable. so this nicole she begins in that place, a place of feeling the forms of her life, mother, wife, daughter, and the forms of the novel

telling stories, narrative, they've grown too small for her and she's looking for more freedom. she's looking for the courage to kinda break those old forms and change, transform. well the list that's in my head of things that i believe ultimately this book to be about you've just all hit on. (laughing) reality, freedom, identity, and transformation. those are my big ones, have i missed anything? i mean that's really kinda thematically that's what this book is attempting to explore in ways that overlap and don't. yeah, i mean i hate to reduce it down to-- oh i'll do it, that's fine, i'm super good at reduction. but those are good, but what i was gonna say is those are good, and deep, and huge, and important subjects that i think i'll always want to engage with. but that question of the story of the self that can change and be expanded, or allowing into our sense of reality, kind of a more expansive sense of what's possible in the world.

so much of this book is also about remembering back to childhood, and remembering how we allowed the magical or the contradictory to live together in our minds but we had a much more flexible sense of what the world could be back when we were children. and as you get older, you're much more inflexible. you're inflexible and you say this is what it is, these are the laws of reality, this is how it is and we don't really have a choice. and again, we put that aside when we enter into novels. we know that we can travel back in time, or in this story you can live almost two lives at the same time, and you think about that and you think well that's crazy, that can't be possible but actually isn't it true that all of us have that feeling that we have these shadow lives? that we live this life, but we kind of remember back to well if i had taken a left instead of a right that year when i was 19. then you would have gone down those paths. that, and that, and that would have happened and that shadow life never really leaves you, it's there

in your own mind in your sort of sense of yourself. and so this book is about living many lives, it's about these kind of multiverses of being in one person. now i love what you said about storytelling that sometimes storytelling can be too small or too confined. one of the things that i really appreciative about this is that these narratives are parallel and all of us who have read novels for many years, or seen films for many years are used to the convention of at some point at the end, everything ties together neatly in a bow. there is no intersection of these narratives. they do but really it's-- it's an important one to me but you're absolutely right. i felt that to interweave these two parallel stories would in a sense be inauthentic, would be cheap in a sense because so much of what this book is about is saying look things don't wrap up neatly. not everything touches and is finished with a nice bow

at the end, that the way that we live our lives is often in an uncertain place. we have to sustain a lot of uncertainty and especially if we're gonna live courageously and say i don't know what will happen, i'm going to see. i'm not gonna make every decision about who i am. i as a reader feel that when a writer is assuming that i can't make those connections myself, or a writer's dragging along on a leash, i lose interest immediately. i want to be active as a reader and we all bring ourselves to these books and so that's important to me. i also would say that the way that i think about these structures often, and this has two narratives, the history of love had three, great house my last book had four, they're in concert with each other. so it's like different instruments are all adding to a piece of music and that whole is so much, to me, more interesting,

more beautiful, the meaning is more subtle, than if there was just one linear story. so the theory here is that these books are conceived in similar veins but they're not related. in other words, i should not look too hard to find parallels or connections between say the history of love and this book? i kept trying to go leo gursky to jules epstein, dotted line, straight line, that's really an exercise in futility, that's not the point. i think i'm the same mind and the same soul has kind of written in these books and so there's a continuity of thought, and there's a continuity of ideas, and a progression of the things that matter to me in this world, so in that sense, i do feel like they really do work together. but narratively the characters of different novels don't usually-- there's discrete distinctiveness. can we talk a little bit about, let's nerd out a little bit about how you do this. so this book was seven years since the last book. did it take you all seven years to write this book?

- [nicole] no. was it a sense of some time off and then, like talk about your process at how you arrive at a book like this. well i live a lot, you know? this is something that's sort of i feel like is sometimes discounted in what's needed to write or make anything. you need to live, right? you need to experience things and absorb things, and things need to change in you until you reach a point in where something is urgent enough that you need to make a whole book out of it. so i would say this book probably took me about to write maybe three, three and a half years from beginning to end, but i had little bits of it as early as yeah seven years ago. did you know what this book was going to be at the beginning? i never know. i never know in advance, it's funny we were mentioning oliver sacks, he's on my mind because i just read a new book of his that i wrote a review of called the river of consciousness. and there's a wonderful essay about darwin in there and i thought oh finally i have a way to describe my process because i always explain it and people sort of always are surprised by it and that is it's the difference

between a divine plan and natural selection. there's no divine plan, no divine plan, i don't know where i'm going, there's no grand chalk board where i've mapped out all the parts. you're not story boarding out this book. there's no note cards, there's no note books, nothing, it's just instinct. early on i'm looking for what's most alive in the characters. do you at least start with a concept, with the idea of what you're trying to, i mean it's difficult to say a novelist trying to accomplish anything, but do you start out at least with an end point, or a goal in mind, and then work back from there? no, i start out with as i said certain things that feel urgent to me, like in this case i started out thinking about how increasingly it seems to me we are living in a world in which we are almost afraid of the unknown. that we have so prioritized information and fact which gives us so much comfort, we can just lay our fingers on google and all of the known world's accessible. but to me that portrays a certain anxiety and yet turning toward the unknown and the unknowable

for thousands of years has been what fills us as a species with awe, with wonder. things which i value, i think we all value a lot. and so why is it that we keep turning our back on that and keep sort of almost making a religion out of information and so i wanted to write a book that was about that. about turning toward the unknowable, about filling oneself again with wonder. and so that's a sense, a sense of something that felt urgent enough to want to write a book about it, but it wasn't like oh well how can i make that clear in characters or narrative? it's a lot of instinct. but for a novelist to confront the unknowable, by which i mean in very practical terms, i'm coming to the experience of writing this book without a clear plan in mind, without a note book, or without an end point, there's something exhilarating about that, but i also have to believe there's something terrifying about it as well. there is but it's also like saying to a jazz pianist

isn't it weird for you to improvise on stage? but that's what i do. that's what you're doing. i do. you're improvising. that's what i do and i've been doing it for so many years of my life that it's not so scary anymore and there's something that i trust about how i work, and how i think, and i didn't quite finish that thought about natural selection, well it's about pursuing accidents, and after 15, 16 years of doing this i have an instinct about where is the good accident. that is the accident that happens in the page that i didn't mean for it to happen when i woke up that morning, i didn't think that that passage or that scene was gonna go there but it's an accident that brings life to the book, and i know to pursue it. how much revising as you go do you do? again nerd craft here. as i go, i think, i rethink, i go back. the book itself, as with all of the books that i've written, they have been written from beginning to end as you read them. one page, after another, after another,

so it's not like i write different parts and then like a deck of cards, shift them around. it's really written exactly as you read it because the structure needs to build organically in itself and the ideas need to build. especially important in the case of your nonconventional or unconventional narratives. it's crucial that these things all happen as a unit. yeah, right, exactly, and so again it's sort of improvised but i'm not working on a stage in front of a live audience so of course i can write something and spend all day on it, and wake up the next morning and say i don't think that went in the right direction. do you let anybody read it before it's done? this time around i had the really wonderful experience i never had before of reading it aloud to somebody as i wrote, so chapter by chapter-- really? i would read the chapters aloud, which was strange and very, very wonderful. you'd never done this before? never done that before but it's incredible how you can gauge sentence by sentence somebody's reaction and it actually gave me the incredible sense of the pacing, how to make the pacing work because of course when you're reading to someone, you know when something is sort of, the tension is lagging,

or when something's funny, when it's working, yeah. but of course the interesting thing about the world that we live in today is that there are going to be people who are gonna consume books like this and very possibly this book in a non-written fashion. right, listening to it. so people will listen to the book and so in fact while that may not have been a consideration in previous books, or in previous years or generations, this is now a thing. to let people listen to, i think that it is wonderful that that's the case and that's returned. you're good with that? yeah. i actually really wanted to read this book myself on the audio, but somehow or other it didn't work this time but maybe next time. oh i'd lobby for you to read your own book, i think it would be great. i'd really enjoy that. so somebody else reads the book, you've had a couple cases where people have been interested in your books as films, and in fact one that i discovered, i was surprised that the history of love was, derek jacobi played leo gursky. yes, yeah, it was made last year i think but it was a european production.

- [evan] how do you feel about that? about which, the film itself or about it being-- about the concept of film, i mean you could tell me about the particular film, but just the idea that somehow they're taking your thing and making it into their thing. does it remain your thing when it's their thing? no, i feel that when you publish a book, or any kind of art, when you put an album of music out into the world, or painting, it doesn't belong to you anymore, i mean you are the author of it, but in a sense it's a gift and it's taken by other people. they add their own feelings, their memories, their layers of life to it, and the book grows and grows, and becomes many things but it no longer belongs to you in that sense. the consumption of it is a pretty personal experience. i really feel it has to be for it to work. you have short stories coming up next, is that what you're working on, a collection? yes, i am, which is absolute pleasure actually. - [evan] why? because at the end of every novel, the experience of writing these books is extreme for me, i mean it just,

everything that i feel and that i am at that moment in my life goes into them and when they're finished, i'm exhausted. they're deeply personal, whether the character's named nicole, or whether it's aaron an israeli father, or leo gursky, or alma mereminski, they're all very, very personal to me, these novels, and contain a lot of myself. so afterwards, i need to rest in a sense or i just don't have that big a book in me for a while and to live, as i was saying. so this time around, i have promised to write a book of short stories and i see that it's a wonderful thing because i still i'm writing all the time, it's just the things that i have, that i want to work on now are just a little bit smaller than a whole novel. well i can't wait to see that. this is such a great book and how nice to get to hear you talk about it and to meet you. thank you. congratulations on your success. thank you. nicole krauss. thank you. thank you so much, good. (audience applause) - [announcer] we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard

to find invitations to interviews, q&a's with our audience and guests, and archive of past episodes. the advice that i have for young writers is never the advice that their writing teachers give them and that may be because i never took a writing workshop and so i don't know the right thing to say. what i always say is your freedom is of utmost importance and you write to be free. that's to me at the core of writing since i was 14 years old. - [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy and by claire and carl stuart.