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Product Description
Review
Starred Review. 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.
Book Description
For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. "This is a novel about the long journey of a magnificent desk as it travels through the twentieth century from one owner to the next. It is also a novel about love, exile, the defilements of war, and the restorative power of language." National Book Award citation
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great House,
By
This review is from: Great House (Hardcover)
This book has completely blown me away, the writing is superb and has restored my faith in the written word. It is the first book that I ever read by Nicole Krauss. The story and the way that it has been told is spell-binding. She is a true storyteller.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A marble statue...,
By
This review is from: Great House (Hardcover)
After much thought, I decided to give Nicole Krauss's "Great House" four stars. It's an average of five stars for beautiful writing - her wording is exquisite - and three stars for the ultimate remoteness of the story and the characters. Reading this book was like looking at a beautiful, pristine, white marble statue. I can appreciate the lines and the form and the features: the statue is a thing of beauty, but not of meaning or heart.As has been noted by other reviewers, Krauss's story centers around an old, large, wooden desk, owned by writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The desk's provenance is as often in question as people from Hungary, Israel, New York, and Chile have worked at it. The four main characters, passing thought time in non-linear order, remained to me as faceless and identityless as the former husband referred to simply by his initial, "S", by Nadia, the New York writer who gives up the desk to the supposed Israeli daughter of a murdered Chilean poet Nadia had received it from in the early 1970's. Most of the characters moved through Krauss's novel at a sort of "remove". I didn't feel any connection with them. I wish I had, I really wish I had. I was left with an emotional emptiness as well as an appreciation for a beautifully written novel. That may be enough for most readers but it wasn't quite enough for me.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of those books I know I will read over and over again,
By
This review is from: Great House (Hardcover)
I can't begin to tell you how much I truly love this book. Initially, it was the writing itself that made an impression. It's lyrical. On almost every page I came across a sentence that I wanted to read again--sometimes I stopped and read it out loud. As the book progressed, I started to fall into the characters and really care about them. My sense of myself as a Jewish woman made the reading book into a very personal experience. I think some of the attraction is because I am at that point in my own life that some of the things happening in the book seem familiar (and sometimes frightening) to me. The central story is intriguing and the inter-relatedness of the stories, when they each reach their own endings, seemed both startling, and inevitable.Throughout the books, the theme of isolation and loneliness within relationships played out. There were reasons kept secret over decades, pasts that could not be shared, the demands of writing itself, and finally the isolation that happens as people approach the end of their lives. She articulates the many ways the people who are closest to each other keep their distance. As I turned the last page, I felt compelled to begin the book again. I was just not ready to put it down. This is the first Amazon review I have written. I loved the book so much, I couldn't help myself.
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