Overlap a desk with a house—the task of a scribe, the container of a spirit—and the imagery veers into the religious. Here both the desk which is real and the house a tendril of an idea that emerges cumulatively are weighted down with tremendous symbolism and combine to form the complex apparatus that unites five very different stories.
It passes from one person to another, from the beginning of World War II into the politicized s and then to a kind of neutered yet spastic present day. The Holocaust stole it from its original hearth in Germany. It ended up in England, then New York, then pretended to go to Israel but really went into storage. As such, the desk and the stories of the people around it are the heart of a tiny Jewish diaspora. With her idiosyncratic blanket-of-words style, Krauss builds a consuming rush of a novel, far more organic and eloquent than her much-lauded The History of Love , although like that novel this is a distinctly Jewish story, almost Talmudic in its interpretative layering.
People tell stories about themselves, and these stories are shaped not by their voices or characters but by unique self-understandings. Each story is essentially a puzzling out of an experience of loss, and each in some way reveals a connection to the overbearing desk.
It is, in fact, the loss of the desk that marks the beginning of three of the five stories. Krauss' masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling… This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author's first two books and bring her legions more. There is a beautiful sort of logic to the way its pattern unfolds—like a song, heard for the first time and yet strangely familiar.
Her latest suggests her as [Philip] Roth's most likely literary heir. With Great House, anyhow, Krauss has made an undeniable bid for literary greatness.
A complex, richly imagined new novel…Mesmerizing…Krauss aims to explicate, not the underlying implications of her characters' behavior, but the very cycles of history…It's a daunting undertaking, one that not every writer under 40 would choose or can do justice to, but Krauss's talent runs deep. And she cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany.
Although most of her characters are prisoners of the past, Krauss herself is a fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion, giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes. Imagine a surprising, breathtaking panorama, captured in four adjacent Polaroids developing at different speeds that only reveal the full view at the last moment, and you have a feel for the patient mastery of Krauss's achievement.
Both philosophical and riveting…the pervasive sense of loss, the yearning for second chances, particularly in love, make this book an emotionally vibrant meditation on trauma and healing…It's this unrelenting combination of intellectualism and emotion that kept me hooked.
Its beauty runs thick on each page…Heartbreakingly real pathos and sadness… In Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award, Krauss gives us nothing less than a reminder of why we read fiction in the first place.
Surely if there is one book each author is meant to write, then there might also be one book each reader is meant to read. For plenty of fans out there, Great House just might be that book. A remarkable new novel…Krauss builds a consuming rush of a novel, far more organic and eloquent than her much-lauded The History of Love …[She] sweeps us in. This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent…A formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow.
In Great House, Nicole Krauss has built a monument to the art of the novel. She reminds readers of the limitless restraints of a novelist, and in four connected stories manages to break down all notions of form and expectation to create a work that is so exceptional and ambitious that it is nothing short of a triumph…Such an emotional and complex novel…is truly a marvel. Nicole Krauss has assembled a somber, riveting meditation on the place of things in our lives…She has introduced fantastical details into harrowing, philosophizing prose…It is hugely sophisticated.
It is frightening, it induces a form of wonder. The book begins in the early s 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. 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. Jun 07, BlackOxford rated it really liked it Shelves: jewish , american. 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 essay 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. 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. View all 6 comments. Oct 11, Ursula rated it did not like it Shelves: novels.
This is the worst book I've read in years! The narratives are incredibly disjointed and confusing. None of the characters is interesting enough to warrant the energy required of the reader to piece together their stories in a meaningful way. The writing itself is trite and one gets the feeling that one has read similar stories by better writers. By far the worst flaw of the book is the lack of propulsion. I'm amazed that I read the entire book as there was nothing driving the book forward.
Witho This is the worst book I've read in years! Without giving too much of the novel away, I will say the image of the shark was arresting and beautiful but that the furniture motif felt forced and fell flat.
Why this book was nominated for the National Book Award is beyond me. View all 3 comments. Nov 19, Violet wells rated it really liked it Shelves: faves , 21st-century , contemporary-american-fiction. 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. And just wish Nicole Krauss was more prolific. View 1 comment. Oct 03, Kim rated it really liked it Shelves: mmxi , contemporary , cultured.
This book is not about a house, great or minute. I really really like the view spoiler [desk. It's not a real spoiler, I just wanted to test that feature out. It sounds This book is not about a house, great or minute. 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. Desks like these are for S ignificant P eople.
I am comfortable in knowing I am not one of them. Except to my six year old, who has yet to learn. Personal space, buddy. 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. 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. 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. I will compare near future books with this one. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me.
But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. I read differently know, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time.
View all 11 comments. May 10, Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing Shelves: holocaust , israel. 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 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 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. View all 5 comments. Jun 13, Eh? 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 ca There are books that are the right ones at the right time.
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. 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. View all 51 comments. Mar 19, Dolors rated it really liked it Shelves: read-in 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, throug 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.
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. View all 12 comments. Jul 30, MissBecka Gee rated it did not like it Shelves: zbooks-i-read , full-on-crap , borrowed-from-peeps. 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. View all 46 comments. Oct 03, Jana rated it really liked it Shelves: heart-and-mind , fiction. It is no doubtfully a beautiful book.
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 conn It is no doubtfully a beautiful book.
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 as people, but that is that — dark emotional intensity in all of them is something that will put off some of the future readers, and attract many.
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, breath and live as a writer.
She encircled herself with respect and attention, but she still in the same time while bearing herself naked in the public eye, left a huge part of her professional life uncovered and mystical - that 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. 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. View 2 comments. 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 p I loved this story, I identified with so many of the characters. 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. So many intertwined stories, different yet similar.
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 jealo 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 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.
Apr 03, Kristina rated it liked it. To begin, the writing in this novel is beautiful, eloquent, and achingly real.
0コメント