Veľký dom

by Nicole Krauss, Oto Havrila (translator)

Americká spisovateľka Nicole Krauss sa od posledného románu Dejiny lásky pohla celkom inam. Kým dosiaľ "iba" písala - vymýšľala, hrala sa a zabávala, teraz akoby ju prikvačila aj tienistejšia stránka písania a v najnovšom románe Veľký dom ju podrobuje dôkladnému skúmaniu. Opisuje rôzne domy, ich rôznych majiteľov a ich rôzny nábytok - osobitne velikánsky písací stôl -, ale my pomaličky začíname tušiť, že ten veľký dom, ktorý zavše pripomína bludisko, ten chrám, ktorý sa stále rúca a odznovu buduje, je náš svet, naše vlastné myslenie.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Jewish

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2010

About the author

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in The Best American Short Stories 2003, The Best American Short Stories 2008, and The Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

Reviews

[Joel · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I say again: writing a book of short stories, fitting them together Tetris-like, and calling it a novel DOES NOT MAKE YOUR BOOK A NOVEL. Also telling your publisher to put "a novel" on the cover after the title DOES NOT MAKE YOUR BOOK A NOVEL. If you write a collection of short stories, IT IS OK TO CALL IT A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES. Because you are Nicole Krauss, especially, because you will probably STILL BE NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD.

***

(EDIT: But YOU WON'T WIN, thankfully! Lord of Misrule will win.)

***

This is a very well written book throughout, meaning sentence by sentence. Nicole Krauss can string words together effortlessly, can create haunting and memorable imagery through evocative metaphors you'd never dream of. But... all those sentences didn't add up to much of anything for me. It definitely feels like the form is what interests her, but the Big Idea (interconnected stories that are all related to the perhaps malovelent presence of an imposing desk, its many tiny drawers standing in for the melodramatic seekrits! and secret pains of its many owners) obscures the characters.

It sounds interesting, but it isn't. It's monotonous, and confusing. Puzzling out the structure is a pain in the neck because the stories, each with a different narrator, all sound the same, whether the speaker is a middle-aged American woman or an elderly male Hungarian Jew. Everyone mopes about the WEIGHT OF MEMORY (this was probably explained to me on the jacket copy because I honestly had a hard enough time concentrating on the plot), which is symbolized by furniture and also by how they constantly talk about their horrible memories. I don't have to like the characters, but not a one of them had much of a spark, which made reading about them distasteful AND dull.

I can't say I'm surprised this was nominated for the National Book Award, but I am disappointed, because I think if it wins, a lot of extra people are going to read it, and a lot of them aren't going to like it. And I read a lot of other books this year, books that weren't nominated, that I think would benefit from the extra attention and might also be a lot less likely to alienate readers. For all of the depth of talent on display in the prose, this is an oddly lifeless book, and I don't see it connecting with most readers, even "serious readers."

In conclusion: I would not recommend Great House: A Collection of Stories and I certainly don't recommend Great House: A Novel.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I sit down to assess the past year with Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, I decided to read a Jewish author who I have never read before. Recently in one of the groups I am in here on Goodreads- the Reading for Pleasure book group- I took a turn holding the quill for the group's Pepys Project, a diary detailing literary births, deaths, and happenings for each day. The last day of my turn was August 18, the birthday of author Nicole Krauss. With her new book Forest Dark due to hit shelves soon, I felt that this was a way of telling me that I should experience the award winning author's works for myself. Reading descriptions carefully, I decided upon Great House, a title evoking imagery of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem with a multi-layered plot full of surprises along the way.

From the novels first pages, it was evident to me that Krauss is both a leading Jewish novelist and literary fiction writer today. The book starts out where Nadia, a writer perhaps meant to be Krauss herself, is talking to a judge. In a stream of consciousness monologue, Nadia takes her readers down memory lane as she describes her life as a novelist over the last twenty five years. While the story takes place in the present, Nadia's entire existence is rooted with a chance meeting with Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky twenty six years before. Although their affair was brief, Varsky left Nadia his immense desk. This desk, which held more than just sentimental value to Varsky, becomes the focal point of Nadia's career, as she sits there to write seven novels, which become her livelihood. It is during work on the eighth novel that Varsky's supposed daughter comes to ask for the desk back, sending Nadia's life and career into a tailspin.

In each section of the novel, Krauss introduces another protagonist whose life has been impacted by this grand desk. Originally the property of a prominent Jewish family in Hungary, the desk had been plundered by the Nazis and underwent a journey across four continents until it reached its present destination in Nadia's apartment. In a London suburb, Arthur Berg cares for his wife Lotte who is dying of Alzheimer's. Lotte had also been a writer and made the acquaintance of Varsky; she was so taken by him that she gifted him her desk, that had once been a gift from a previous lover. Berg did not realize the impact of either the desk or of Varsky on Lotte's life until her disease had overtaken most of her memory. Thus, the desk underwent more travels through history.

Each protagonist is stronger than the other. Krauss introduces her readers to an Israeli attorney named Aaron who is reeling from the death of his wife Rivka. Aaron has to come to grips with his relationship with his adult son Dovik, who had always been introverted and closer with his mother. The family's relationship with the desk is not inherent from the start; however, Aaron's monologues describing Dovik's troubled childhood are among Krauss' most poignant passages in the novel. I can only help feelin for Dovik as he lived with the trauma growing up with a father who did not understand him and was much closer to his rival sibling.

Finally, the plot comes together with the introduction of Weisz, a furniture dealer who has rescued countless pieces of antiques pilfered by the Nazis from places around the globe, and his children Yoav and Leah. Like the other characters in the novel, the triumvirate has a deeply personal relationship with the desk; however, as the family originally comes from eastern Europe, it becomes apparent that their history with this piece may be greater than that of the other characters. Even though each piece of plot moves slowly, Krauss' use of prose is exquisite and a joy to read. I could not help but reading quickly through this gem to find out the origins of the desk and who its rightful owner is. With emotions riding high as to the ownership, the second half of the novel moved faster than the first.

Toward the end of the novel, Weisz delivers a poignant monologue explaining the novel's title. In the words of biblical scholar Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, he explains that to "Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form. Later his school became known as the Great House, after the phrase in Books of Kings: He burned the house of G-d, the king's house, and all houses of Jerusalem, even every great house he burned with fire." So close to the new year, I appreciate Krauss' use of biblical anecdotes to the Jewish people as people of the book. I thoroughly enjoyed this intricately woven novel of memories, a web of human emotions, and strong prose. I am sure that Great House will not be the last of her novels that I read, as I rate this gem of a book 4.5 stars.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

How Did She Do What She Just Did?

I looked forward to reading this novel for several years, was apprehensive in the first couple of chapters, persisted, got my bearings, then in the second half grew confident that it would blow my mind (which it did).

The novel makes demands on you, you have to exert yourself, but the rewards are enormous and profound.

As at the time of writing this review (if I can call it that), I finished the novel less than 24 hours ago. I still haven't worked out what else to say about it.

There is so much I want to talk about with somebody/anybody. However, because of the desire to avoid spoilers, I know there are things I mustn't say in a review.

The problem is, it's these aspects of the novel that fascinate me, and they are so numerous, so I'm going to write whatever spoiler-free thing comes into my head relatively spontaneously.

I'm sorry I can't do better than that yet, but I want to at least make a start, while the book is still fresh in my mind.

One thing I must say, though, is that I admire what Nicole Krauss achieved as a writer in this novel.

My immediate reaction was: how did she do what she just did?

Somehow, she seemed to drag me along from the relatively mundane to the sublime. Only, I just never anticipated how sublime it would be.

The (Absence or Loss of) Plot

It isn't a narrative-driven novel. There is no plot to speak of (or is there?).

There is a sense in which Nicole Krauss is rebelling against the traditional plot. To that extent, this is an exemplary Post-Modernist work.

The narratives are set at different times. Lots of dates are mentioned. The first thing I tried to do after I finished was to write down the dates and what happened.

Some sort of chronology emerged. I moved the pieces around like a jigsaw puzzle, and bit by bit a clearer picture eventuated. But it's one you could keep returning to, year after year, trying to get better at reading or assembling it.

The Structure

The book is less than 300 pages long. However, it took me almost a hundred pages to detect its rhythm and feel comfortable. I think this was because I had anticipated something quite different (possibly as a result of the blurb).

The structure of the novel is quite simple to describe. However, aspects of it resemble and raise similar issues with respect to the juxtaposition of different narratives as a recent novel that consisted of nested stories:

* It's divided into two parts.

* The second part is almost a mirror image that expands on or resolves the first part.

* Each part has four chapters (roughly 40 pages each).

* Each chapter has a title. Three of the chapter titles are repeated in the second part. The fourth (and last chapter in the book) is given a new title, but relates to the same person/people.

* The sequence of the chapters changes between the two parts of the novel.

* Each chapter is narrated in the first person, more or less as a monologue.

* There is relatively little dialogue. We really get into the head of each narrator, whether or not we like or empathise with them.

* There are a few stylistic anomalies in some chapters (e.g., clumsy similes), which made me wonder whether Krauss' attention to detail might have slipped. However, ultimately, I decided that she knew what she was doing all along, and that this inelegance was a trait of the narrator, not the author.

The Journey

The novel doesn't just progress from A to B, or from A to Z. However, regardless, the novel maps a journey. All of the steps are carefully recorded.

By the time we get to the end of the novel, we're conscious of the journey as a whole. What seems to be fragmentary as we progress, is ultimately assembled together in a manner that accomplishes completeness, a whole, an entirety, a world, a universe, a Great House.

Equally importantly, the journey is not just the journey of these narrators. Krauss has a unique ability to make the journey (seem like) our journey as well.

I don't just mean this in the sense of empathy or verisimilitude.

I mean that she makes us make it our journey as well. We have to exert ourselves. We personalise it. We don't just observe characters acting. It's almost as if we get up on stage and join them. We are trying as hard as them to make sense of this world that is being presented to all of us in fragments.

This world that Krauss is portraying is not just their world. It's our world as well. We learn about ourselves as we learn about her narrators.

I'm reluctant to describe the individual narrators or the chronology of events.

It might seem trite to say that it's essential for you to experience them yourself as part of your journey through the world of the novel. I can't and don't want to take (and don't want to spoil) your journey for you. It has to be your own journey.

The Great House

There are many times on the journey when you ask yourself what the Great House is.

It could be many types of house, both literally and metaphorically: an actual physical home (with all of its furniture and contents, including a writing desk), a family (as in the House of Usher), a Temple, even a Book (whether holy or not).

Whatever type of house, I think it's a defence or buttress against the abyss.

Whenever I read the word "abyss" (particularly in the context of philosophy), I wonder how the word originated.

I tend to visualise it as a hole or an emptiness. However, there's also a sense in which it is the opposite of being "grounded": it might mean that we are "un-grounded". We have no solid, physical foundation upon which to stand or build a home. It might seem paradoxical, but just as we might fall into the abyss, we might float or fly away from solid ground, if we are un-grounded.

"Great House" is concerned with this abyss and what it takes to be grounded, although not necessarily in so many words.

The two words that come to mind for me are "absence" and "loss". In a way, both describe the non-presence of some object or characteristic or person.

"Absence" could mean that it has never been present; "loss" might mean that it was once present, but is no longer so.

The novel raises the question how do we (or should we) deal with the abyss, with the absence, with the loss.

Each narrator is missing something, whether or not it has always been absent, or whether it has been lost, or whether it has been burned or stolen, or whether it has been given away (whether permanently or temporarily).

Each narrator is estranged by the absence or loss. Each narrator tries to do something about it in their own unique way.

It's questionable whether you can overcome the absence or loss by yourself. Although the absence or loss might apply to a physical object (like the desk), it applies equally to relationships (like love).

Krauss explores these issues in the context of the Jewish predicament. However, I think it is equally applicable to other religions and cultures.

The Jewish people have had to deal with two challenges: the loss of Jerusalem, and the Holocaust.

One response to the loss of Jerusalem is to:

"Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form...each one of us [can] only recall the tiniest fragment: a pattern on the wall, a knot in the wood of a door, a memory of how light fell across the floor.

"But if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one, the House would be built again...or rather a memory of the House so perfect that it would be, in essence, the original itself...a perfect assemblage of the infinite parts of the Jewish memory...we live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a key hole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door."

So memory is part of the mechanism by which we combat the abyss, and books are the depositories of memories.

Many of the characters react to the absence or loss by way of their silence. They internalise and bottle up their anguish.

Sometimes, you need to be opened up or uncorked or unlocked. Sometimes, you are the key hole, and somebody else holds the key. Sometimes, you have to realise that you yourself hold the key.

Together, our fragments form a perfect assemblage. Together, we form a Great House.

This novel is a Great House assembled out of the fragments of real or imaginary lives. By the time the novel is finished, its shape becomes apparent, and everything locks into place. It is a truly holy book.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m surprised this was written after History of Love because for me, though perhaps more grown up, it’s less accomplished. The design is brilliant but let down by the execution. There are four first person narratives, all of them Jewish. The Holocaust is rarely overtly mentioned but it haunts the entire novel. Its memorial is a desk that connects all these people. One problem I had was all these voices tend to ramble, all go off point. There are entire paragraphs which could be removed without in any way altering the book’s design. Often there was a brilliant page followed by a page of hot air. And these characters aren’t as memorable as those in History of Love. They’re all also rather unlikeable. Control freaks. No doubt this was intended as a depiction of the repercussions of carrying Nazis atrocities in your genes but I felt it could have been achieved with more elasticity, more flair, more, dare I say it, charm. History of Love almost had a surfeit of charm after all.

It’s also a detective novel and I greatly enjoyed figuring out all the connections. I admired it but I didn’t quite love it.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading The History of Love, I promised myself to read something else by Nicole Krauss when I had the chance. I found Great House at a local thrift store for $1, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent.

There are several narratives to follow and they are tied together by a desk, a desk that was part of the stolen property of Jews displaced by the Third Reich. Each of the narratives is a story in itself, a glimpse into the lives of people who struggle with their humanity and how they fit into the world at large. What each story has at its core is the theme of loss, memory and isolation. Many of these characters have an excruciating inability to reach beyond themselves and touch others or let anyone in.

This book is written like a maze, weaving in and out, characters coming and going. It is a puzzle with pieces that lie just out of the reach of your hand and without which you can never make a complete picture. There were moments when I wondered if I had missed something crucial, I felt so lost, and then Krauss would lay down her next layer and I would find the pieces interlocking and making sense. There was, within that revelation, an accompanying feeling that I had discovered something not only about the characters, but about myself.

This is a book that raises important questions and leaves you pondering answers long after you have reached the final page. How much can you know about another person? Does a person deserve to have his secrets respected after death? How long can you close a person out before it is too late to make amends? Can we ever understand a person fully if we do not have access to their history, their stories, their losses? How can we not live with death every day, when we all know death is the ultimate outcome for each of us?

And then there is the concept of a thing carrying the memory, and in some way the residual life, of those who are lost. I know from experience that when a person is gone, any possession they cherished takes on a different meaning. In some ways, it can come to embody the idea of that person and feel like a bridge to their soul. And, we can be linked in our minds to our pasts by smells and textures and breezes that blow through windows carrying sea spray or the smell of roses. We can sometimes feel that if we could recreate those things, that material world, we could repossess our lost lives, our childhood, or our loves.

Krauss writes prose that flows and sings and carries you along like a river. For example, she describes an Alzheimer’s patient in words that capture perfectly what those of us who have known the progress of this disease easily recognize.

I could see in her eyes that beneath those words there was nothing, just an abyss, like the black-water pond she disappeared into every morning no matter the weather. Then followed a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion...And then even that period passed, and she no longer remembered enough to be afraid, no longer remembered, I suppose, that things had ever been any other way, and from then on she set off along, utterly alone, on a long journey back to the shores of her childhood.

If I was jolted by her transition from story to story, I was pulled back into the story immediately by her use of description and language. The thread may have been tenuous at times, but it was worth any effort required to follow the thread to its end.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to Extract Empathy

Krauss is a mistress of extracted empathy. She can drag it out of you even when you fight it, particularly empathy for writers: for Nadia, a writer prevented by success from writing what she ought; for Dov, an Israeli, prevented by apparent paternal sadism from becoming a writer at all; for Lotte, an Holocaust-traumatised emigre writer, who reportedly goes skinny dipping every day on Hampstead Heath; for Isabel, a failed Oxford student (presumably a writer, if only of essays), who makes some bizarre personal decisions. Their stories touch each other just enough to amplify the empathy one feels for each.

It intrigues me how she does this. The fundamental theme is one of alienation - from loved ones, from family, from the world, from oneself - as described by four narrators. But the variations on this theme overlay each other to absorb the reader into the desperation of each. How are they connected? Are the stories about the teller or the one told about? Is the central theme the awkwardness of living with authors, even with oneself as an author? Or is the real story that of people coping with emotions buried so deeply that they can only be alluded to and discovered in a sort of psychoanalytic process carried out in print?

The literary devices in Great House are as complex as the variations on the basic theme. The thin thread of a piece of furniture is used to keep the parts together. But there are numerous recurring tropes: The collapse and inversion of time over decades; the random interjection of discontinuous events; the phrase “after what happened” without explanation, used unexpectedly to queue up a later revelation; narrative characters (and narrators) left unidentified for extended periods; the teasingly repeated denial of expected resolutions; open family secrets never discussed; the homecoming after years of absence; and withal the withholding of any suggestion of purpose until the end. The effect is one of not just suspense but an experience of a pressing need to know how the characters survive, if indeed they do.

So, a complex, challenging and rewarding work by a pro. Can’t ask for much more.

[Kemper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m more a genre guy than a literature reader, but I’ve been trying to branch out lately. I’m glad I did because I’ve read some amazing things that I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise. However, it only takes one book like this send me running back to the mystery or sci-fi section for comfort. It wasn’t bad, but it’s just working so damn hard to be an ‘important’ book that it really isn’t much fun to read. And maybe all books shouldn’t be fun, but they really shouldn’t feel like this much work either.

The book begins in the early 1970s in New York with a writer named Nadia losing all her furniture due to a break up with a boyfriend. A mutual friend steers Nadia to Daniel Varsky, a young Chilean poet who is getting ready to leave New York and has an apartment full of furniture he wants to loan out until he returns. The most impressive item is a large desk. Nadia takes the furniture and later hears that Daniel was tortured and killed in Chile during Pinochet’s brutal rule of the country.

Years pass and the one constant in Nadia’s life is the desk. However, when a young woman claiming to be Daniel’s daughter from a fling he had in Israel shows up, Nadia immediately relinquishes the desk to her, but soon regrets it.

Several other stories are told in parallel to Nadia’s. An Israeli man mourning the death of his wife pours his heart out in a story to the son he never understood. The husband of a British writer discovers a shocking secret about his wife after her death, and a young woman reflects on her love for a man who had an odd relationship with his sister and their father who is trying to recreate the study of his childhood home that was lost in the Holocaust. Eventually, the links between all of the stories emerge.

Krauss is one of those writers who impresses me technically but leaves me a bit cold despite writing something that was obviously going for the heart. A big part of my problem is that that four of the characters are almost exactly the same. Nadia, the British writer, the young woman in love, and the Israeli son are introverted types who live their lives mainly through books and words to the point of ignoring everything else. I especially found Nadia tiresome because this is a woman with every advantage who deliberately chooses her writing career over relationships yet whines about her own nature constantly. It’s hard to feel too sympathetic for someone who cut themselves off of their own free will and yet who is so fragile that the loss of a desk will plunge them into a depressive bout of writer’s block.

The plot comes together in a nice web of cause-and-effect, but overall this book felt like getting stuck in a conversation with someone who obviously wants to be doing something else, but then proceeds to tell you about everything they’ve talked about with their psychiatrist.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I Forget Thee…

Let me say it up front: Nicole Krauss is a major writer at the height of her powers and her latest novel is a towering achievement. Her subject is loss, and a process of reconstruction that is always painful and inevitably only partial. Loss, of course, is a central theme for many Jewish writers of her generation, but Krauss has dealt with it with greater consistency than most. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, treated the subject obliquely, through a protagonist who loses all his adult memories as the result of brain tumor and must find ways of constructing a new life in his spiritual exile. Although her second, The History of Love, has something of the quality of fable, it tackles the subject more directly, by bringing together the stories of a Jewish boy writing in Poland before the Holocaust and a teenage girl in New York in the present day. In it, Krauss introduced the idea of using two or more separate stories that come together only at the end, not necessarily in the ways one might expect; here, she takes the approach a great deal farther. For fragmentation is a tragic reality of the Jewish experience, and with this novel Nicole Krauss makes diaspora into a literary technique.

With Great House, Krauss leaves behind the almost childlike quality of her previous novel and takes possession of her maturity like a mansion. The four voices whose monologues make up most of the book all belong to people of middle age or older; they are people whose business is words and ideas; they have lived lives complex enough to include both achievement and regret; they describe themselves with a merciless clarity that does not, however, exclude the possibility of change. Their stories are perplexingly unconnected. A successful novelist in New York is visited by the daughter of a murdered Chilean poet whom she had known in her youth, and requests the return of a desk that he lent to her. An elderly Israeli lawyer, sitting shiva for his wife, is joined by his estranged son, now a distinguished British judge. At another funeral in London, an Oxford professor thinks back over his long marriage to his own late wife, and of those parts of her life that she kept resolutely private, even from him. An American scholar recalls the time she also spent shuttling between Oxford and London, and her friendship with the two children of a reclusive man who runs an international business in antiques based in Jerusalem.

As we read, we inevitably look for connections between these stories, only to find that the few clues do not seem to link up. Instead we start to find thematic connections: roots and rootlessness; the almost arbitrary importance of possessions; parents dominating or neglecting their children; the use of writing to make sense of a shattered life; the loneliness of having to choose between the peopled world and the inner haven of ideas. Although the four speakers are distinct, each of the sections is richly textured, challenging the reader to keep a tight grasp on the increasing complexity of the structure as a whole; those tottering nested boxes on the front cover turn out to be a most relevant image. The one thing that does seem to connect most (but at first not all) of the stories is the poet's desk, and we begin to understand the symbolic importance of recovering objects that recall a life before old age, before the waning of inspiration, before torture and death, before the Holocaust. But we also learn the secret of another kind of identity that can survive the loss of property or the destruction of Solomon's Temple: the temple of ideas, of laws and knowledge, the Great House of thought and belief that can transcend diaspora.

Important ideas seldom occur in isolation. The structure of almost disconnected narratives here reminded me a little of Frederick Reiken's brilliant debut novel Day for Night, but with a much longer attention span. Some sections of the Israeli jurist's memories of the failed upbringing of his son seemed uncannily close to David Grossman's recent To the End of the Land, though they are painful for rather different reasons. But the very thing that sets this book so impressively apart from its contemporaries is probably also what will make many readers like it less: it is uncompromising in avoiding the spurious tying-up of loose ends. As the book enters its second part and many of the same voices return, we will find our compassion growing and understanding deepening. There will be epiphanies—but they will be small ones. We may never know how everything fits together in every detail, and actually Krauss can be a little cavalier in the connections she does make. But it can be that way in life too, where even in the best of circumstances a perfect reconstruction is unlikely. And for a people who have had the larger part of their heritage erased forever by the Holocaust, it is impossible. Nicole Krauss is their chronicler, chief mourner, and poet.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

A common criticism of this book is that it’s more like four short stories than a novel. It’s true the four narratives, with a little tinkering, could stand alone as brilliant inspired stories. There’s a suspicion too that Nicole Krauss has difficulties writing novels. Only two in ten years – in stark contrast to someone like Murakami who knocks them out with what’s becoming almost a facile (and self-harming) ease. The stories are connected by a mysterious writing desk (reminiscent of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes when it’s a collection of Japanese netsuke that are used to follow bloodlines). Though the desk vanishes for great stretches of the narrative it haunts the lives of every character in these pages. Initially the desk is another victim of the Nazis. It vanishes from the home of a Jewish family in Germany. At the heart of the book is an antiques dealer who restores furniture looted by the Nazis to their Jewish owners. So the desk becomes a symbol of both home and heritage and in Great House we see how it affects the lives of a truly fabulous cast of characters. The characters are so vividly engaging that we miss them when they are gone – which is probably my only misgiving about this book. It’s difficult to keep the bigger picture in mind because of the overwhelming sweep and luminosity of each new page. It’s a bit like falling in love when the new lover utterly eclipses all who have come before. But it has to be said that there’s more brilliant writing in this book than any I’ve read this year so, on the whole, a massive thumbs up from me. And just wish Nicole Krauss was more prolific.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not about a house, great or minute. It’s about adesk.

Okay, so maybe metaphorically speaking it could be about a great house, like as if we all live in the ‘great house’ of life blah blah blah but, really, it’s about adesk.

I’m not complaining. I really really like the desk. (aside: you can actually click on those... It's not a real spoiler, I just wanted to test that feature out.) It sounds like it could hold a house with all its drawers and it’s magnitude and daunting history. “To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner too make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility….This desk was something else entirely; an enormous, forboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers.”

I am sure that I am not worthy of this desk. Desks like these are for Significant People. I am comfortable in knowing I am not one of them. Except to my six year old, who has yet to learn.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel at the end of this book. It’s sort of… aloof. It has a presence and it’s not one to embrace you and absorb you within its pages being so unkind as to make you ignore your family, friends, traffic lights. No, it’s dignified. It stands there and says ‘OK, I’m here and I will tell you a story but you need to follow along, I’m not going to hold your hand, I’m not going to wait for you—don’t try to hug me. Personal space, buddy.’ It’s been awhile since I’ve read something like this and at first the psychoneurotic in me pushed it away. I didn’t feel the demand and it made me stand offish.

I’m not sure where the switch happened. Where I couldn’t put the book down even though it still had me at arms length. Was it at "I tapped a giant bruise on my knee that I couldn’t remember getting. I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.” or was it “… silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to coexist in a family.” I think I just sort of erected a shanty around it. Each section is really its own story and the one thread is the desk. Krauss takes her time connecting them, instead introducing you to new characters or revisiting characters from early on. It can be infuriating if you’re looking for flow but I’m not, so all’s well. I have not read The History of Love yet; I’ve started it and it kind of bored me so…. but I’m sure it was my fault, not the books (it’s never the book’s fault.) so I wasn’t familiar with her writing style. I have to say that it made me feel brainy. You know how some books make you sad or mad or bored or angry? This made me feel mature. Each section reads (to me) like a telling. The character is in a confessional and what you read is raw, exposing, looking for absolution. It made me guffaw to come across her quoting Camus ‘The act of love is always a confession.’ See? Me=Smart.

But, what can I really say about this book? I liked it. You may not. I tend to like female writers, not really sure why, but I do. I enjoyed watching the history of the desk, of what it meant to each character or how it affected others. There were lines that made me sigh: "There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.”
This will stick with me. I will compare near future books with this one. It won’t wear off so soon.

There were two quotes where different characters refer to books that I read more than once then jotted down in my notebook:

“The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life—a pot, a chair, a lamp--- threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn’t like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.”

You’re preaching to the choir, Nicole.

“I spent the morning reading Ovid. I read differently know, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time.”

What a sad thought, especially when I can’t remember a lot of the books that I love, but I guess that’s something I have to let go of, for now.

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a light and simple story where there's a plot developed in the classic structure, this is not your book.
This is a tough novel, it requires guessing and work on your part, it's like a puzzle that somehow the reader has to put together. And for me, what makes it a great reading, is that you are not conscious of getting close to solving that puzzle, but when you turn the last page everything makes sense in a strange and singular way, like remembering your own memories, through flashes and blurred images.

Four seemingly unconnected stories in different times and places with only a "desk" in common, as if that desk is the only witness of the lives that cross its path, witness of sorrow, loneliness and loss. And, of course, of love. And as a lot of the characters that appear in the stories are writers or poets, I'd say this book also emanates love for literature and the art of composing in a very natural way.
A glimpse of the stories: a fifty year old writer regretting her chosen loneliness remembers a one night stand with a Chilean poet who later is murdered by Pinochet Regime. An old lawyer recently widowed struggles to communicate with one of his sons, with whom he's always felt estranged but whom he loves and hates deeply at the same time. An old writer who takes care of his sick wife discovers secrets from her past he isn't ready to digest. Two atypical brothers with a strange bond struggle trying not to disappoint their distant father.

The voices in the stories are poignant and evocative. I found myself rereading twice some paragraphs because of the beauty of some reflexions and a distinct force behind them. The writing style is sublime, the stories flow as in memories, there are no explicit facts or a lineal storyline, it's mostly feelings attached to past times which come like waves, they flow into your system and you finally forget it's a character talking, it could be your own conscience speaking.

I also think this is not a book for everybody and that it can become frustrating not knowing where all this rambling is leading, but if you let your mind free of constraint, you'll experience life in its core. Because that's what this book is about: life. And as I have read in some other reviews I wouldn't qualify this novel as oppressing or pessimistic, I'd say it's realistic. Won't we all have to deal with loss and frustration and death some time in our ives? How will our minds process those feelings? You've got the answer in this book. It's your choice to get it.

[Eh?Eh! · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are books that are the right ones at the right time. This one was a book at a certain time, maybe not just right, but with rough hewn edges that generally fit, squint the eyes a little, hold a thumb sideways, good enough. Life has thrown me from a moving vehicle and since I wasn't wearing my seat belt, the resulting scrape has left all these exposed nerve endings to be once again scraped by this book.

It wasn't the best read to have on the commute, the jerking of the bus and other people causing abrupt breaks in concentration. The jumps from character to character weren't the easiest to track even if there were no interruptions. There is a whole historical and cultural ocean that I just don't have the background to understand. And all the stories ended up having a looser tie than expected.

But I recognize the awareness of loneliness in the writer who had neglected all in favor of work. I got swept up in the unrealistic depiction of a woman who could see her lover's unspokens, though it didn't help them. I nearly wept for the father who just couldn't connect with his son, despite the crushing love he had. I was hurt for the husband whose sense of self is upended by the discovery of an old secret. My world is small, my pains personal, my reading close, my life unimportant. That's why these individual stories dug into me, not what I think was an overall thrust of a theme on relating existence and parts=whole something or other. My eyes are on the ground. I hope there are birds overhead, but I don't tend to look up to see them. Besides, based on recent experience, they would just poop on me anyway (damn crows).

[Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is no doubtfully a beautiful book. And it has something that I’ve never seen before: sentence by sentence of this novel are thoroughly poetically contemplated and moving. It is one big explosion of wonder, how did Krauss do it? I was overwhelmed with her writing style.

But her four short stories are a bit confusing although they intertwine all the time. I don't know what really happened to all of them in this book. As one reviewer wrote, I as well wanted to draw a picture of how they are connected but I didn’t, because in the end it didn’t really matter. I would still be confused because - essential riddle of life isn’t sweet and reasonable.

Great House moved me because of the palpable sadness. It grabbed me and tossed me around with dates, character plots and studies. Every character inherited sorrow and normal life is not possible for them. Their inner agonies are wincing and shaping them. There is as well this anguish that makes them very much unlikeable, but, dark emotional intensity in all of them is something that will put off some of the future readers, and attract many.

These characters don’t look into their future, they are stuck in a moment, stuck in a time. Lingering between fitting into the society and gluing itself to pondering.

This book on the other hand is a marvellous guide for future writers. Krauss spilled herself out. I felt like she gave the keys to her inner world of words, but not just by using those words that she so portently mastered, but was very insightful and raw with her own idea about what it means to be, breathe and live as a writer. She did have this one sidekick where she purposely wrote that just because a book had been written that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s utterly subjective, and by saying this, she placed a safe net under her body. She encircled herself with respect and attention, but while bearing herself naked in the public eye, she left a huge part of her professional life uncovered and mystical - which only belongs to Nicole the writer. Very wise move, some call it diplomacy as well.

But I truly believe that many still shy writers will silently quote her words, and take her words as their own shield.

I can say without hesitation that Krauss is an outstanding storyteller and analyst, but she will come to her zenith in ten, twenty years. She is very fruitful, but it’s apparent that she is still too heavy on herself, still slightly out of focus. But what a blissful out of focus stage that is. She is never going to write breezy literature because she is always going to be very much attuned and connected with frequencies that we as human send to each other when we want to recover, heal and breathe.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this story, I identified with so many of the characters. How a person can fold into themselves so much and not realize they are blocking out the rest of the world. How you can live with someone until death do you part and not really know them. How one decision changes someone's world. How we are all entitled to our secrets, to tell our secrets or to hold them till the grave. How the person holding the answer, to a question they never knew they had, has a choice, do they open the folded piece of paper or do they burn it. Based on other reviews maybe the writing isn't great; maybe this doesn't measure up to other of Nicole Krauss's works. I'll be listening to this again.

3/14/13
I listened to this again and it still was captivating. So many intertwined stories, different yet similar.

[MissBecka Gee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a collection of short stories revealed in alternating halves.
All the stories were long winded and barely had a connection with each other.
This was not good.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great House is both a novel with an overarching theme, and a collection of short stories - most of which are told in two parts, and all of which have loose connections with the others. In All Rise, a lonely writer in New York is haunted by the memory of a Chilean poet she met many years ago. In True Kindness, an elderly man in Israel, close to death, is both infuriated and pained by recollections of his difficult relationship with his youngest son. In Swimming Holes, a man is consumed with jealousy over the mystery of his wife's connection to a young male visitor, and after her death he sets out to discover the truth about what they meant to one another. Finally, in Lies Told By Children, a young American student at Oxford University becomes infatuated with a brother and sister whose father, an antiques dealer, has devoted his life to recovering the furniture stolen from his family by the Nazis. A single motif connects these stories: a huge, imposing antique writer's desk, owned by a variety of the characters at different points in history, and pivotal to the lives of a few.

The significance of the desk varies between the stories; it really is a loose connection between them, something it's easy to describe in a review like this one, rather than a strong, unifying theme. It's most symbolic in All Rise, in which Nadia agrees to look after it for the poet Daniel Varsky, whom she never sees again. The desk represents the importance of writing in her life, even seeming to become an imposing, 'jealous' physical threat when she first sleeps with the man who will later become her husband. There are other, more subtle, running themes - although Nadia is the most obvious example, the book is full of characters who are consumed by their love of books and find it difficult to interact with others. These are not fairytale characters who find happiness among kindred spirits, however; they push people who care for them away, they are lonely, they suffer. I liked that about this book, a lot.

This is another of those literary novels that's all about characters looking back on their lives, meditating on loss, memory and regret. Everything seems to be unspoken, everything is dreadfully complicated, and everyone suffers in silence, hardly ever simply asking for the answers they seek. If Krauss was British I'm sure it would have been nominated for the Booker prize. In a lot of ways, it's nothing new, but the key thing is, this woman really can write. I frequently found the descriptions breathtaking, and the characterisation is wonderful; even if the characters' actions are often frustrating and sometimes very hard to understand, they seem so real. Since having my Kindle, I haven't used the highlighting function very much - I've never been the sort of person who underlines and marks key passages in books, even books I truly adore - but with this, I found myself highlighting paragraphs all over the place. This was partly because I strongly related to a couple of the characters (especially Nadia), but also because their observations were so beautifully put, succinct yet poetic.

My favourite part of the book, by far, was the first half of All Rise, and because this opened the book, I was concerned the rest wouldn't live up to it. I was sort of right about that: while the writing was consistently great throughout, I didn't connect with any of the other characters as I did with Nadia (although Isabel in Lies Told By Children came close). Aaron in True Kindness has by far the strongest and most distinctive voice, but I found his narrative hard to get along with. It's true that Great House could be described as a collection of tales rather than a novel, which might disappoint some readers expecting a whole and coherent story, but ultimately, it isn't this that's stopped me giving it a higher rating. I just felt there was something vital missing and however much I admired the style, I couldn't make the connection I wanted to with the story or most of its characters. I would read something else by Krauss, because I think she is a wonderful writer, but I just couldn't fall in love with this book.

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I so desperately wanted to like this book because I adore the concept of separate but linked stories that become a beautiful tapestry by a novel’s end. To begin, the writing in this novel is beautiful, eloquent, and achingly real. The characters, however, are ALL remarkably unlikable and the stories are linked by the thinnest, most transparent thread (the object itself is a massive, imposing desk but the linkage is shaky). Everything in the novel is angst-y and morose; the language is redemptive but ultimately I feel there are better literary choices with the same structure.

[Annie Loerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm embarrassed to say i actually sat down and drew out a diagram trying to sort out how all the characters were connected! then, in a fit of desperation, i logged on and google-d it, trying to find a post that would decipher it for me! so maybe i'm a simpleton, but it seems as though this type of book should not be so laborious. someone tell me, please, and put me out of my misery - the judge that nadia is addressing, is it his son, the melancholy soldier/would-be writer that she hit with her car?

sigh. this whole book just felt kinda flabby to me. it seemed like Krauss didn't make any choices - like whenever a pleasant turn of phrase came to mind (and there were several in this book) she found a way to work it in, at the cost of being totally verbose and even awkward in places. at several points i found myself thinking, "she should have saved this gem of a sentence for her next book, it has no place or purpose here..." a strange feeling to have when reading a book. its the difference between krauss and someone like j.d. salinger, i guess, whose nine stories is just so dead on, for some reason it kept coming to mind when i was reading this...

criticisms aside, i still enjoyed reading this book and will continue to read anything she writes.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moments of soaring, heart-shattering prose. Krauss has the ability with one sentence - the gaps between the words, really (what you're expecting, more than what you are reading) - to imply and evoke the depth of emotion from the tragedies of life. It doesn't hurt that her characters have undergone or are experiencing the greatest contemporary tragedies of our times - the Holocaust, war, political persecution, sickness, death, deep and unreconciled domestic splits.

Much of this is about writing and, secondarily, reading. Stories, novels, poems, letters - the characters reading them, and those writing them - they all play a prominent role. It seemed like an insider's view of something that was not quite accessible to us mere mortals. And the rest of the symbols, the houses, desks, various pieces of furniture (themselves fraught with history and crumbling with time and misuse), in which or upon which the stories, novels, poems were written - were sometimes a little esoteric for all their material solidity. Sometimes too clunky; other times a little too subtle.

I dunno. It seems churlish not to like it more than I did. I bear most of the blame, no doubt, for not reading more attentively and consistently. But whether it was because of that or something else, the problem here is that none of the beautiful and heartbreaking words and thoughts and images on the page ever came together as a novel.

[Mizuki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great House is a I like this book, but I can't give it four stars three stars read.

The writing is beautiful and it's as smooth as fine powder white cream, the stories of different characters hold promises to greatness, I like how Ms. Krauss' characters can be understandable and complicated at the same time---and many of them don't even have to be likable in order to hold your interest. But the end.................it's so disappointing. I even feel like I'm reading an unfinished book when I turned the last page.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautifully written book is set in the US, England, and Israel. It has no primary protagonist. The novel consists of interwoven stories of five people with ties to a massive ornamental desk. The novel opens with an American novelist living in New York, who obtains the desk from a Chilean poet. Subsequent narrators fill in the history of the former owners and portray the mostly sad and tragic events of their lives. Taken individually, the stories can feel disjointed, but together they tell a poignant tale of memory, loneliness, and loss.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I almost made it to page 100. I was thinking that the narrative was quite loose, plot developments subtle with a heavy focus on the characters' inner lives, a bit more intellectual than I typically choose, but I was soldiering on, trying to prove my literary merit as a reader. Hey guys, wait for me, I could have been an English major too! But when I read the following sentence, which occupies half of page 95, I gave myself permission to hang it up:

"But they didn't come, and so I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte's and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?"

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicole Krauss is an accomplished writer. Of that, there is no doubt. Her prose flows, even in a so-so work like this one. The problem here is that, although the prose flows, it just flows. This novel has multiple narrators speaking to an unspecified you, a Your Honor,and a son. However, the tone, no matter who is speaking or about what, remains the same. There are no distinguishing features between the narrators. Since the chapter titles don't include the narrator's name, that doesn't give the reader much help in figuring out who is currently talking. You figure it out by the names the narrator uses and the like.

An even bigger problem for me is that none of the narrators or other characters in this book is at all likeable. The least offensive is pitiable. All the narrators are incapable of real connection with anybody else. With two exceptions, they are virtally devoid of emotional attachment to another human being. One of the exceptions seems happily married, but he kvetches constantly about one son he never could "understand." The other one, the one he terms "normal," he doesn't seem to care much about. The other exception involves siblings who are in a virtually incestuous relationship with each other, but tied to an authoritarian, aloof father who seems barely human.

Ostensibly, the book is in that genre in which the history of an object forms the narrative framework. In this instance, it is a desk. We meet its various owners, which is the way this this genre organizes its plotlines. The problem is the desk is just a big desk. It has no magic to it, and except for its bulk seems to make no difference in anybody's life. Towards the end of the book, there is a paragraph by one narrator about how much the desk meant to her, but, since she never said anything about it after she returned it to its previous owner early in the novel, this paragraph doesn't ring true. Moreover, we never do find out how one of the desk owners got it in the first place. One of the narrators never even owned the desk, so why he's floating around this novel, I never figured out. When the ostensibly original owner of the desk finally gets it, he doesn't exhibit any joy or satisfaction in finally getting it. He just considers it an affirmation that he's a genius at getting what he's after. Since he is otherwise a loathsome human being, the reader is not likely to care about that. It was just something of his father's, a man we know nothing of except he was caught in the Holocaust and was a briliant scholar. Since his son never carried on his father's life work, getting the desk seems a poor memento of the father's life.

Oh, at the very end, we do find out why one narrator kept saying, "Your Honor." However, not only is it impossible that any judge in any court of law would have listened to this woman's overlong story of her failed life, the reason she's before the judge has nothing to do with the rest of the novel. It's an intrusive element apparently to add a little plot twist.

I recommend Krauss's The History of Love, but this? Well, it will help a rainy afternoon pass by. ( )

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

So it started with a desk and ended up being about a desk all along. Or not. This narrative reminded me of a dramatic monologue or soliloquy. I really liked the flow, the arrangement of words were sugary literary goodness. I admit if I just read the blurb on the back, I might not have picked up the book to read, but because I leafed through the first few pages in the bookstore, I knew I had to get it. Krauss writes with the wisdom of an 80-year-old, dissecting her characters and producing a story that starts in their minds. Very provocative and mysterious.

It is a book about examination. About marriage, family, love, exile. A book that links a few cultures and countries. At first you think they are short stories, until you see the connection between the characters. An older man takes a look at his relationship with his secretive and war-survivor writer wife who now has alzheimer's, a young woman examines her love for an antiques dealer son (lots of non-overt yet strong sexual language here), a father examines a relationship with his son after his wife dies, an older writer examines her life and the choices she made to chase off love and not have children, the antiques dealer is examined through others, but ends up giving his spiel later. Unique and interesting read.

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while I will read something that affects me on a personal level. It becomes so intense that it is like a relationship, a secret relationship that I have with the characters of the story. It is not only that I can relate to the characters, feel their pain, happiness, anger, and fear it is that the author allows me to feel that way in a very subtle and almost sneaky sort of way. There are only a couple books that have made me feel that way in the past, The World According to Garp, She’s Come Undone, and Lolita are just to name a few. Those books took me to places in the human psyche where I never thought I would ever go. Sometimes while reading about these characters I start to imagine who they are in my life, inevitably I believe that authors model their characters after real people in their lives. My favorite authors are ones that make me reread the sentences to make sure I understand their full impact. I also love when I have to research exactly what the author is talking about. Often times that research leads me to other authors that have inspired them and I in turn engulf their work just to see how the influence exists. Nicole Krauss is a fairly unrecognized author in the mainstream, but I have read one of her other books, The History of Love , and was so inspired to read Great House. Krauss has an amazing way with words and reading her books is like listening to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time. She invents characters with so many flaws and internal struggles that you start to question your own internal struggles. With sentences like, “When you die, are you Hungry” or "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering,” I almost have to do a double take to make sure I really understand their impact. Krauss makes you wish that you could use simple words and weave them into these sentences that take your breath away. I must admit that I had to read The History of Love twice because it was really intense and I wanted to make sure that I grasped the characters and the essential meaning of the book. I am sure that in a couple of years I will reread The Great Room. Krauss has a formula for her books and she tends to write in a choppy sort of way in that each chapter is the story of another’s life. It is sort of like she threw the pages up in the air and where they landed is where she unravels the stories. At first it is hard to keep up with the characters; a fifty year old woman who is telling a story to a judge about her life and a desk that she fostered, A father and son gripping with the death of their wife and mother and trying to understand each other, A professor who is trying to unlock the secret of his wife’s past, and a tormented thirty something who is in love with an antiques dealers’ son who has depressive tendencies. All these stories surround this desk that was stolen from a Jewish family when the Nazi’s came into power. What I love about this novel (and her other books) is how she is able to connect all the characters together for brief chapters, yet you are still able to relate and connect to the characters on a deeper level. I must admit that at the end of the book I got upset because it was ending. I didn’t exactly like the way it ended, and I had some questions and I had to reread certain pages to fully grasp the novels conclusion. The persona stories within the novels are marvelous and any author who can see a perspective from another sex (other than their own) is a great story teller. I am glad that Nicole Krauss exists and I hope to read more of her work.

[Andy Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel consists of four stories, three of which are connected by possession of an antique desk. The desk belonged to a Jewish family in Europe that was stolen when the Nazis too the family, the son who survived the war spends his life putting finding his family home's furniture and that of other Jewish families. Through that story we learn of the Holocaust's effect on generations born after its end by seeing the impact on the furniture dealer's children.

The desk is taken to London and ends up in the possession of a young writer who was able to escape the Nazis but left knowing that the rest of her family would be murdered. Her story is told from the perspective of her husband whose love for her allows him to accept her strong privacy and loneliness.

Through the husband we learn that she gave the desk to a young Chilean poet. The circumstances of her getting the desk and of giving the desk away remain largely a mystery. The Chilean poet leaves his desk temporarily with an American writer, but the temporary custody turns into 25 years as a result of the poet's return to Chile and become one of the "missing" of the Pinochet regime. The Chilean poet's brief appearances in the novel, both told by third parties, seems to haunt the book. The desk is then taken by the daughter of the furniture dealer with consequences that rip that family apart.

The novel is not as straightforward as the plot summary. Chapters weave from story to story, to different narratives, jumping back and forth across generations. There is a consistent loneliness throughout the book and I found myself throughout the book, and at the end of the book, wanting to know more about the characters and wanting to know what happened next to their lives

If I had one complaint about the novel is that some of the narrator's monologues about their lives got to be , well, monotonous. But on the whole this was a great book, one that makes you wonder about it while you are not reading it and makes you want to go back and read it again

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

An imposing wooden desk with nineteen drawers floats through this book like a buoy, and sometimes with shackles, loosely uniting four disparate but interconnected narrative threads. The desk is largely a monument to Jewish survival, loss, and recovery, and mirrors the dissolution, pain, and dire hope of each character. Additionally, it is a covetous object, given a poignant and existential significance by the chorus of voices that are bound to it by their memories.

"Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form."

This elegiac story opens with Nadia, a now divorced and successful writer, who received the desk in 1972 from a Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky. Daniel needed a place to store furniture, and Nadia had an empty house. After a long night that resulted only in a brief kiss, he leaves her his desk, as well as other pieces of furniture, and returns to Chile and the tragic conditions of Pinochet's Junta regime. He never returns. Years later, during a particularly low period of her life, she receives a call from a woman, Leah Weisz, who alleges to be Varsky's daughter, and who has called to claim the desk. In the midst of this narrative, we occasionally break to Nadia confessing to an unknown "Your Honor." Nadia's attachment to the desk is profound and the loss of it signals keen despair.

Leah and her brother have lived a nomadic (yet insular) privileged life with their father, George, a mordant, esteemed antiques dealer who is legendary for his prowess in recovering any loss object. He is obsessed with scrupulously reconstructing his father's study, to make it the way it was before the Gestapo pillaged it during World War II. Odd as this may seem, this reassembling in relation to Jewish culture and history is sublime.

There is another Jewish family, a father with two sons, Dov and Uri, whose link to the desk is more obscure and is revealed in the latter part of the book. He plaintively details the loss of his wife, Eve, and confesses to the tenuous relationship with his sons. Its climactic section is the weakest and most strained of all. I suspect that Krauss used it as a more concrete connective device.

We also meet a grieving widower, Arthur, whose wife, Lotte, once in possession of the desk, died of Alzheimer's and left an elusive trail to a dark secret. Arthur warily and then desperately decides to investigate her past. The strands of Arthur's narrative lead to connections with other voices and a searing self-examination. Certainties are founded on shifting sand; a commanding desk holds many compartments.

The central denouement (there is more than one climactic scene) is the most moving and mystical of all the segments of the book, and for this reader, poetic and riveting. Its link to ancient Jewish culture is beautifully rendered and breathtaking. It makes sense of the entire book, as well as the title. I am tremendously indebted to Nicole Krauss for hypnotically transporting me to this summit of Judaic history.

Krauss is a cultivated and gifted prose writer; she edifies the reader with striking imagery while digging down to the boots of a person's soul. At times, she is long-winded, which nearly thwarts the pace of the story. And the peppering of Nadia's proclamations to "Your Honor" was a stylistic choice that didn't always work for me and felt self-conscious.

This non-linear and (architecturally) unorthodox story covers approximately sixty years, and is theme-driven; plot is secondary. The engagement is often cerebral, but also powerful and emotionally acute as the threads unravel. Additionally, what contents can lay for years in a locked compartment? What does a key open us to? There is much gravitas and many memories to unlock.

Some characters seem oblique, impinged upon by the relentless peal of confession, or lack distinction from each other. They run together, like spilled ink, (but sympathetically so). It may be what Krauss intended, because the characters' words, (and sometimes their absence) fluidly conjure that metaphor. Moreover, Krauss' delicacy of insight and reflective wisdom, like a haunting obituary, overcomes most obstacles, even a towering desk, and comes to a transcendent conclusion.

Highly recommended for all literary collections.

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four interconnected monologues, each split into two parts, where loss is the dominant theme, though there are multiple common elements such as writing, authoritarian fathers, Jewishness and so on. In addition, there is a plot of sorts linking three of the stories, which revolves around ownership of a desk that has great symbolic significance; the narrative splits are to ensure that not too much is given away. But the connecting threads are not very strong and the monologues could well be separate novellas or short stories.

Great House starts with “All Rise” where an unnamed New York writer (so inward looking and reclusive that her two ex-partners are known only by their initials) appears to be addressing her monologue to a judge - though there is clearly something else going on because two short paragraphs right at the start hint at some catastrophe or accident. The narrator describes how she came to own a huge, ugly desk that had belonged to a Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky, and which some 20 years later is claimed by Daniel’s daughter, Leah Weisz.

It’s a rather bleak and passionless first half. But if the Great House is a metaphor for the Mind (Krauss does say this) then furniture, and the desk in particular, are stand-ins for ideas and emotions. For this desk becomes overwhelmingly important to the narrator once it’s gone and in the second part she attempts – what? - to get it back? She’s not even sure, but a series of increasingly fraught encounters leads to a wild drive and her running over a pedestrian – the judge – whom she’s addressing while he is in a coma (I think) in hospital

“Swimming Holes” is set in London; the narrator Arthur Bender is the husband of writer Lotte Berg who was a Jewish refugee, and who shortly after WW2 was given a desk by a former lover. In the 70’s she meets Daniel and gifts him the desk for reasons that become clear in the second part of the story. Here the loss is memory – Lotte develops Alzheimers - and death of a partner and loss of her own son who she gave up for adoption; Daniel clearly reminded her of that son . Arthur wasn’t even aware of any of that part of Lotte’s life until after her death, which leaves him distraught. However, I found this story, with Arthur’s tendency to ramble on and on, the least engaging of the four.

The monologue I found most moving and powerful – “True Kindness” - doesn’t involve this hulking desk or a connection to any of the other characters, but it continues many of the same themes. It’s an Israeli father’s silent letter to his younger son Dov; it’s filled with the love that he was unable to express because their relationship was so fraught, and which eventually drove Dov away. I found it inexpressibly sad and poignant.

And then there is the Weisz family in “Lies Told by Children” (though the second very brief part is simply called “Weisz”). The father, a Holocaust survivor, is a dealer and collector of fine furniture – in particular items that remind his clients of something essential that’s lost from their lives. The narrator Isabel is in love with Weisz’s son Yoav; both he and Weisz’s daughter live strangely confined lives that are essentially controlled by their father. She (yes, it’s the same Leah) is sent to retrieve the desk though in this case it is for the father, not one of his clients. In a minor tussle of wills, the desk becomes a weapon - Leah refuses to let her father have it but he is wily enough to get it anyway . It’s unspoken but evident at the end though, that Isabel and Yoav’s future child is fated to inherit that bloody desk.

The ending seemed rather contrived, as indeed were many of the links between the monologues. With the exception of “True Kindness” Great House had a passionless feel of artifice to it, as if Krauss was constructing something out of disparate materials that didn’t belong together, in order to hide something at its centre.
On the other hand, her writing is absolutely beautiful, and would take your breath away in places. I felt deflated and a bit cheated at the end.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of four loosely connected stories is a demanding read - it requires work from the reader. It has two parts, each with 4 chapters. The stories told in the 4 chapters of Part I are continued in Part II, although one of the stories has a different title and narrator in Part II. The most obvious connection, as the book cover and GR blurbs tell us, is a desk. But the blurbs are misleading, as they fail to mention the fourth story, probably because the direct link to the desk is not there. But there are other connections. Two stories are connected by the presence of the Chilean poet. All the stories have an emotional connection -- in each there are regrets and memories. This is a very somber book.

The story the book starts with was my least favorite, at least at first. The narrator is a self-absorbed author who refers to her ex-husband and another man only by initials. The second story is told by a widower. It is mostly, however, about his wife. The third story is told by a young American woman who is at Oxford on a scholarship. But the story is not about her but about her boyfriend, his sister, and his father. In the second part, the narrator is the father. The narrator of the last story is another widower, but the story he tells is about his relationship with his youngest son. It's ending is tied to the ending of the first story. It is the saddest story.

This is a book that you have to stay with right to the end. The whole is much greater than the parts. I had to stop trying to figure out the timeline -- there is one but ultimately it isn't important. These stories take place predominantly in the heads of the narrators of each part. The narrator, however, is not always the center of the story.

One sentence towards the end of the book captured my attention. I had to re-read it a couple of times and I still find myself thinking about it: "[T]he importance of manners, ..., is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness." (Page 257)

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, the relationships that tie the stories one to another in this novel of Nicole Krauss are not easily followed, and it falls short of the beauty of The History of Love, but that is not to say Krauss' writing in Great House does not have many moments of beauty, because it does.
In the beginning of Great House I struggled with the connections between the characters, the relationships between the individual stories, but I enjoyed it for the writing itself. The story - or stories - fall far short of The History of Love, but some (not all) of the characters are reminiscent of those in HOL. Ambitious? Yes. Does it succeed? Not completely.