Great House [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

This review was based on a complementary copy I received from the publisher.

Nicole Krauss has offered a now familiar (even overworked) structure for her tale of memory and loss. The opening chapters present several seemingly widely separated characters, and the chapters hopscotch in time, backward, forward, while in each chapter at least one or two connections emerge among these characters. This is a narrative strategy that we have seen repeatedly in novels over the past 40 years or so, more and more frequently in recent years. Multivoiced novels are not new, of course, but the labyrinthine treatment of fictional time is more frequently encountered and may now be a mannerism that could well be set aside unless it is urgently needed.

I do not mean that Krauss made a wrong choice in this case, necessarily; her stories of failed communication, concealment and secrecy, conflicting memories, misinterpretations and confusions, are probably best told in this kind of recursive structure, making the novel something of a puzzle for the reader, who must approach the work as an alert and participatory rather than passive observer. The tricksy structure also may serve to conceal or at least distract from some considerable weaknesses in the novel, including the excessive symbolic weight placed on the central "object"--the mysterious desk--which serves as the red violin or the white whale of the plot. For me, at least, it never succeeds in coalescing the several tales--especially those of the failures of love, the most important in the novel.

My most serious complaint, however, is with Krauss's prose style. She writes poetically and many passages are truly rich in both imagery and emotional power--especially when her characters suffer the revelatory experiences that force them to self-recognition. But whether the character is a brilliant young pianist, a self-doubting middle-aged novelist, a retired scholar of Romantic poetry, or a widow living in Liverpool, the "voice" is always the same--while we know that the characters come from different backgrounds, different eras, seriously different points of view and cultural tradition, they all sound the same. And in a few cases (especially the novelist) they do go on and on and on far past the point at which we have understood the situation and significance of their pain. Some passages are undeniably very powerful--as, for example, that in which the significance of the title phrase is developed, or in some of the confrontations between the father and son in Israel--but too often I found myself wishing she would get on with it.

The themes of this novel are not unfamiliar, but are no less powerful for having been rehearsed before; the effort to reconstruct and hold on to the past in order to give meaning to the present is undeniably a powerful psychological drive, and Krauss portrays the different ways it works in differing lives with considerable insight. But finally, this novel felt contrived (for a good purpose, but still -- ) and though very much worth reading, not entirely consistent with its own ambitions.

Let me say it out 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 remind one of 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.