Review by New York Times Review
Admirers of Nicole Krauss's novel "The History of Love" (and they are many, and I am one) will want to know the answer to this question: How much does her new novel, "Great House," resemble its predecessor? The good news is: very much indeed. And the good news is also: not so very much. In themes and preoccupations, "Great House" and "The History of Love" overlap. Both explore shattered characters, with pasts blasted by the sort of loss that makes even the pretense of normal life impossible. (By "normal life" let us mean one in which certain premises can be assumed -for example, that it is possible to put one foot in front of the other, on the way to meet a lover or to buy a loaf of rye bread, without being overtaken by tremors issuing from convulsions of the moral order.) The narrative structures of both books mirror the characters' own shattering and require readers to reassemble the full story for themselves. And both books coalesce around artifacts from the past. In the case of "The History of Love," it is a book; in the case of "Great House," it is a writing desk. Given the nature of these organizing objects, it is no surprise that both novels designate literature as singularly significant. Writing - at least when it is great - is a kind of consecration, placing its practitioners in the way of assaults from large truths and perils. This last theme runs the risk of morbid solemnity; everything rests on the execution. SO what, then, is so different about the two novels? It is their tone. "The History of Love," despite its tragic underpinnings, is anything but solemn. Its sorrow is rambunctious, its anguish rollicking. Its fulgurating pain comes out in shrieks of unlikely laughter. This extraordinary feat of immaculate blending is accomplished by main characters who are, despite all (and all is truly terrible here), stuffed with unconscionable amounts of charm. In particular, there is Leopold Gursky, who is, to my mind, one of the great characters of recent fiction, as hilarious as he is tragic, an exquisite amalgam of great artist and great clown - think of Beckett, with a Polish-Yiddish accent. Gursky does not choose to be excluded from normal life, but rather strives, with quirky futility, to achieve the ordinary. This is the derivation of so much of the exuberance in what is an essentially tragic novel. The characters of "Great House" lack all trace of exuberance. Normal life does not beckon them. They inhabit their sorrow with a lover's ardor, cultivating it into an art form. There is a forbidding, and seductive, remoteness about them that captures those who draw too close and then can get no closer. There are four strands to the novel, and the tasks of narration fall to those who have been caught by these dangerously removed enchanters. (In one case, the enchanter is not human, but the art of writing itself.) These narrators are marooned in a terrible place, unable to return to the safe shore of normal life, unable to follow their enchanters into the deeps where only they can breathe. Their enchanters are themselves enchanted with their own sorrows. They have been shaped around what it is they have lost, a central idea in "Great House" - in fact, the meaning behind its title. The novel opens with a writer named Nadia telling her story to someone she addresses as "Your honor," whose identity we will learn when we ought to. She is explaining herself, and her explanation is focused on her relationship with the desk that, decades ago, she came to half-possess. Abandoned by her boyfriend, who left with the furniture, Nadia learned of the desk from a friend of a young Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky, who was leaving New York to go back to Chile, at least temporarily, and needed a place to park his furniture. The desk she got from him is a huge affair, best described by another narrator, whose wife passed it on to Varsky in the first place. "This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding 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." There are, to be exact, 19 drawers, one of them permanently locked. The desk stayed with Nadia in New York for decades, never reclaimed because Varsky had become one of Pinochet's disappeared. Then one day a young girl, claiming to be both Varsky's daughter and from Jerusalem, called Nadia and asked for the desk, which Nadia relinquished, a more wrenching parting than any human had ever presented her. The narration is then taken up by a father, who lives in Israel and whose connection to the story we must wait to discover. He is addressing his son, Dov, one of the suffering remote who are such a torment to love. Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature's elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. "Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?" This father, both ruthless and heartbroken, is a bundle of contradictions vibrating with a boisterous grief reminiscent of Gursky's. The next strand belongs to a cultivated British husband, Arthur Bender, whose wife, Lotte Berg, was the one who gave Varsky the desk. She had come to London from Germany as the chaperone on a Kindertransport, leaving her parents to be murdered in the camps. She, too, is a writer, a locked drawer and a torment to love. Her husband begins to guess at the loss around which she is formed only at the end of their long life together. And then the narration passes to a young American woman who has come to Oxford to study literature before falling in love with the male half of a mysterious sibling pair, Yoav and Leah Weisz, who are themselves held captive by their father, George Weisz, a famous antiques dealer, originally from Hungary, whose genius lies in being able to locate pieces plundered by the Nazis, objects remembered with infinite longing by the original owners and their children. WHAT gives the quickening of life to this elegiac novel and takes the place of the unlikely laughter of "The History of Love"? The feat is achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. So, for example, here is George Weisz describing how, when his clients speak of their lives before the war, "between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. . . . I see his mother's legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper's broom missed." Those crumbs are an artist's true touch. They demonstrate how Krauss is able, despite the formidable remove of the central characters and the mournfulness of their telling, to ground "Great House" in the shock of immediacy. Krauss has taken great risks in dispensing with the whimsy and humor that she summoned for her tragic vision in "The History of Love." Here she gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall. Krauss's narrators are marooned in a terrible place, unable to return to the safe shore of normal life. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 10, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Krauss, in her follow-up to the best-selling History of Love (2005), tells her story entirely through the voices of her characters. All of the elements of literary fiction are conveyed through the monologues of five people: a writer from New York, an angry Jewish father from Jerusalem, an American woman studying in Oxford, the baffled husband of a Holocaust refugee, and an éminence grise who wraps things up but not too tightly. Readers follow the trail, set forth in straightforward narrative and flashbacks, of an immense desk, which casts its shadow (sometimes literally) over the lives of all five characters. The plot is intricate and rewards careful reading. Krauss' masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling, and reminiscent of ZZ Packer at her very best. In addition, the points of view of the various narrators, taken as a whole, present a broad picture of plot and motivation. Thematically strong, Great House examines the daily survival of Jews and demonstrates the destructiveness of lies and secrets within families. This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author's first two books and bring her legions more.--Loughran, Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent. The novel consists of four stories divided among eight chapters, all touching on themes of loss and recovery, and anchored to a massive writing desk that resurfaces among numerous households, much to the bewilderment and existential tension of those in its orbit, among them a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis. Much like in Krauss's The History of Love, the sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this latest from Krauss (The History of Love), a huge old desk with many drawers becomes the symbol of love and loss for a host of characters from different countries and time periods. There is the New York woman who has written all her novels at the desk, which she was keeping for a Chilean poet who has since disappeared. Then there are the poet's daughter, who comes back years later to claim the desk; the antiques dealer who tracks down meaningful items from people's pasts; the brother and sister who live isolated in a Jerusalem home filled with other people's furniture; the elderly couple in England who live with the desk and a horrible secret; and the dictatorial father who desperately tries to understand his creative son. VERDICT While each character's story is engrossing, the connection among them is at times impossible to follow. Still, Krauss deals with heavyweight themes-the Holocaust, the different ways people cope with suffering, the special cruelty of fathers, the costs of creativity-with meditative, insightful prose that makes for an intense and memorable reading experience. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A many-drawered writing desk resonates powerfully but for different reasons with the various characters in this novel about loss and retrieval from Krauss (The History of Love, 2005, etc.).This brain-stretching novel travels back and forth across years and continents. In 1972 New York, a young novelist named Nadia spends one magical evening with a Chilean poet, Daniel, who then returns to Chile. Daniel leaves in her care a desk he claims belonged toFederico Garca Lorca. Shortly afterward, he dies at the hands of Pinochet's secret police. In 1999 a young woman named Leah announces to Nadia that she is Daniel's daughter and wants his desk returned. The reclusive Nadia lets Leah, who resembles Daniel, ship the desk to her home in Jerusalem but is emotionally devastated afterwardthe desk represents her writing life. Her sense of herself as a woman and a writer deeply shaken, she decides to visit Jerusalem. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, a retired lawyer yearns to connect to his son Dovik, who has left his own legal career in England to move in with his father after his mother's funeral. Barely speaking, Dovik remains a frustrating mystery to his father. Back in 1970 in London, an Oxford professor finds his jealousy pricked when his wife Lotte, a writer and Holocaust survivor, gives her writing desk to the young poet Daniel, an admirer of her work. Only later, learning that Lotte gave up a baby for adoption before she married, does he realize that Daniel became a surrogate for her lost son. In 1998 in London, Leah is living with her brother when she goes to New York in search of the desk. While the disparate characters do not necessarily interact, their choices affect one another over the course of decades.Brainy and often lyrically expressive, but also elusive and sometimes infuriatingly coy; Krauss is an acquired taste.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
