KRAUSS NICOLE

annoverata tra le migliori scrittrici contemporanee
è nata nel 1974 a New York, dove vive. Dopo la laurea a Stanford e gli studi al Courtauld Institute of Art di Londra, è stata finalista allo Yale Younger Poet's Prize e le sue poesie sono apparse in riviste come la Paris Review e Doubltake.
Dopo aver completato i suoi studi a Oxford si è dedicata alla narrativa. Ha lavorato per la radio e ha pubblicato racconti su diverse riviste americane, tra cui The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Best American Short Stories. Il suo primo ROMANZo Man Walks into a Room (Un uomo sulla soglia) pubblicato nel 2002 è stato selezionato per il Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Ma è con La storia dell’amore, pubblicato nel 2005, che Nicole Krauss ha raggiunto la consacrazione internazionale. Selezionato tra l’altro per l’Orange Prize, sono già stati acquistati i diritti cinematografici dalla Warner Brothers. Il film, diretto da Alfondo Cuaron, ESCE nelle sale DAL 2009.
nella foto con l'ex marito - LO SCRITTORE Jonathan Safran Foer
festivaletteratura.it - dweb.repubblica.it - domist.ne - http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Krauss - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Krauss
facebook - nicolekrauss.com

How have you found the transition from poetry to fiction?
For a long time I only wanted to write poetry. But it's hard - a hard life, I mean.
There's that thing Auden said, about how a poet only believes himself to be a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. "The moment before, he was still only a potential poet: the moment after he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever." With a novel it's somehow easier: the duration of the writing is so much longer, and the unhappiness of the in-between less frequent. I had been working on a long-term project—a radio documentary about Joseph Brodsky for BBC—and I loved the feeling of waking up every morning and knowing there was something on my desk to return to. Something that was becoming larger and more complex over time, gaining weight and mass in my mind. When it was finally finished I suppose I felt a little empty. So I sat down and decided to try to write something bigger, and that became Man Walks into a Room. Once I knew that it was going to be a novel, I started to read a lot of contemporary fiction—especially American—to try to figure out how to do it. This is how you write a short sentence (when reading Salter), or this is how you do good dialogue (when reading Roth), etc. It was very important to me NOT to write what some people call a "poet's novel"—something driven largely by the momentum of language. I wanted a plot. I wanted characters that sounded like real people. I still wanted to use everything I'd learned writing poetry, but to a totally different effect.
Larry Weissman - randomhouse.com

The Art of Relaxation in Turks and Caicos
She'd taken her kids to the Atacama Desert, to Sarajevo, even (in utero) to the Arctic. It was high time for some simple sea, sand, and sun. Nicole Krauss applies herself to the art of doing nothing ...
the first thing people always tell you about the Turks and Caicos, and often the only thing they tell you with any specificity, has to do with the water. I heard so much about the color and clarity of the water that upon landing in Providenciales, at thirty-eight square miles the longest island in the Turks and Caicos, I expected something on the spectrum I'd never seen before, activated by some secret fluorescence. I wasn't disappointed, though I don't think it’s possible for the sea to disappoint—it's like suggesting that the stars in the night sky could disappoint, or any timeless feature of nature which offers us a view onto eternity. The water that laps at the white, large-grained sand is indeed a startling electric blue, somewhere between turquoise, celeste, and cyan, though as it deepens it becomes something else entirely. And, yes, it is very clear; as people will repeatedly tell you, when you walk out in the water and look down, you can see your toes. But you can see your toes in the bathtub, too. ...
cntraveler.com - facebook/krauss - 2013

do women get to write with authority ?
Both “author” and “authority” evolved from the Latin “augere” — to increase, to originate — and expanded in “author” to be someone who invents or causes something. Which returns me to a question that bothered me to no end when I was younger: Who gives her the right? Or more like: How does she take it? How does she claim for herself the authority to increase or originate, or invent or cause something, such as a book that people will read? -NK
nytimes.com - 2017

BECOMING DOMESTIC
A hundred million migrants roam the planet.
They kick up a soft dust, from space they appear
To be weather, a little storm the wind

faithfully carries.

When it rains they lift their bowls to the sky.
They sleep with a rock under their heads.
At dawn they are the first to break

the photographic stillness.

They have lost all sense of distance.

A sort of arrival-late
Under darkening skies, the smell of miles

on your clothes-
A sort of arrival is needed to say how far

you've traveled.

The crunch of gravel in the neighbor's driveway.
He will join the road with those other

sedentary dreamers
The unnumbered who've found a home

just to leave it.

There is no good reason why night after night
I sleep here with you.
Only that the roof over our heads

has not yet fallen.

what is literature really?
Bolled down to a single sentence
i'd say it's this
a endless conversation about
what it means to be human
and to read literature is to engage
in that conversation

illustration jillian tamaki

Nicole Krauss is the 2021 Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature ! The Sami Rohr Prize, awarded annually to a Jewish writer, recognizes the unique role of contemporary writers in the examination and transmission of the Jewish experience .
fb/ ìnk - samirohrprize.org - 16.3.2021

Incroci di Civiltà - festival internazionale letteratura - università Ca' Foscari - Venezia
inaugura Nicole Krauss alla quale va il Premio Bortolotto Possati - Ca’ Foscari
veneziatoday.it - 2021

Letter to Van Gogh
.
Dear Vincent,
You write about fear: Fear of the blank canvas, but also, on a larger scale, of the “infinitely meaningless, discouraging blank side” that life itself always turns toward us, and which can only be countered when a person “steps in and does something,” when he “breaks” or “violates.”
It’s extraordinary that I should have been given your letter now, because it is exactly that act of breaking that has been on my mind this last year, and which I feel has everything to do with how I want to make art, and how I want to live.
It’s a strange thing about the human mind that, despite its capacity and its abundant freedom, its default is to function in a repeating pattern. It watches the moon and the planets, the days and seasons, the cycle of life and death all going around in an endless loop, and unconsciously, believing itself to be nature, the mind echoes these cycles. Its thoughts go in loops, repeating patterns established so long ago we often can’t remember their origin, or why they ever made sense to us. And even when these loops fail over and over again to bring us to a desirable place, even while they entrap us, and make us feel anciently tired of ourselves, and we sense that sticking to their well-worn path means we’ll miss contact with the truth every single time, we still find it nearly impossible to resist them. We call these patterns of thought our “nature” and resign ourselves to being governed by them as if they are the result of a force outside of us, the way that the seas are governed — rather absurdly, when one thinks about it — by a distant and otherwise irrelevant moon.
And yet it is unquestionably within our power to break the loop; to “violate” what presents itself as our nature by choosing to think — and to see, and act — in a different way. It may require enormous effort and focus. And yet for the most part it isn’t laziness that stops us from breaking these loops, it’s fear. In a sense, one could say that fear is the otherwise irrelevant moon that we allow to govern the far larger nature of our minds.
And so before we can arrive at the act of breaking, we first have to confront our fear. The fear that the blank canvas and the blank side of life reflects back to us, which is so paralyzing, as you put it, and seems to tell us that we can’t do anything.” It’s an abstract fear, though it finds a way to take on endless shapes. Today it may be the fear of failure, but tomorrow it will be the fear of what others will think of us, and at a different time it will be fear of discovering that the worst things we suspect about ourselves are true. My lover says that the fear, which seems always to be there when one wakes up in the morning, and which he feels in the hollow between his ribs (above his stomach and below his heart) comes from the “other world,” a phrase that always brings tears to his eyes, and by which he means the awareness of our finitude, our lack of the infinite and eternal. I think he’s right, but I would also add to that that fear, being anticipatory, is always without knowledge. It is a mental calculation based on the future unknown. And yet the experience of fear is the experience of being in the grip of a sensation that seems to possess an unassailable conviction in itself. To be afraid that the plane will crash is, in a sense, to assume that the plane will crash. And yet even if we could scrape away the many forms our fear takes and get to the underlying source-our mortality, our division from the infinite — we would still discover that our fear is not based on actual knowledge, unlike the part of us that chooses to be free. Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion. You implied as much in your letter: “However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that,” you wrote. “He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, “violates.”
And so we find ourselves, once again, in front of the blank canvas. The blank canvas, which reflects both our fear and our opportunity to break it. In Jewish mysticism, the empty space — the Chalal Panui, in Hebrew — has tremendous importance, because it was the necessary pre-condition for God’s creation of the world. How did the Ein Sof — the being without end, as God is called in Kabbalah — create something finite within what is already infinite? And how can we explain the paradox of God’s simultaneous presence and absence in the world? And the answer to this, according to the Kabbalah, is that when it arose in God’s will to create the world, He first had to withdraw Himself, leaving a void. To create the world, God first had to create an empty space.
And so we might say: The first act of creation is not a mark, it is the nullification of the infinity that exists before the first mark. To make a mark is to remember that we are finite. It is to break, or violate, the illusion that we are nature that goes around in a loop forever. But it is also a confirmation of our knowledge and freedom, which is all we have in this world.
Sincerely,
Nicole Krauss
.
bloglovin.com - www2.uadec.mx - rampages.us - 2015

quei silenzi tra una parola e l’altra

stavo scrivendo “ e però ... etc ”
poi ho pensato di mettere un punto dopo ‘e però’ ... dando spazio al silenzio.
sono riuscita ad afferrare come una nuova punteggiatura per il silenzio
“ E però ” indica che dopo c’è ancora qualcosa

FOTOGRAFIE

perché i libri non vengono dedicati con fotografie ?
Per me una delle cose più curiose quando apro un libro è: è dedicato a Matthew o a Georgia.
Chi è questa persona, con cui l’autore ha un rapporto tanto speciale? Così,
come per soddisfare il lettore oltre che l’autore, ho optato per le fotografie.