Great House

Great House is the third novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published on October 12, by W. W. Norton & Company. Early versions of the first.
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Is this restaurant good for dinner? Share another experience before you go. Write a Review Reviews Show reviews that mention. All reviews crab burger enjoyed brunch round room golf course beautiful setting farm house tomato courses. Review tags are currently only available for English language reviews. Read reviews in English Go back. Reviewed 3 weeks ago. Reviewed July 9, Reviewed June 17, via mobile. Perfect golf course lunch setting. I t is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn't mention 1 her beauty, 2 her youth or 3 her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer even younger, slightly less beautiful.

There's an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck. There are, of course, smart and passionate sites out there by booklovers of all stripes, but there's also that strangely hostile army of folks who seem to wake up every morning with no other aim than to tell you, as loudly as possible, how much they hate everything you've ever loved, especially if it's written by someone who, to take a random example, is young, beautiful and married to a famous novelist.

I'm reminded of EM Forster's quote about happiness. Do we find it so often that we "turn it off the box when it happens to sit there"? Are good books likewise so common that we can afford to dismiss them if their writers aren't at least polite enough to be older than we are? If the book is good, so what? Krauss's last novel, The History of Love , was very good indeed.

Great House , its serious, downbeat follow-up, is even better. And that, really, should be the end of the discussion. Great House centres on a massive writer's desk. Filled with 19 awkwardly shaped drawers, one of which is never unlocked, it is "an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of a room". The desk has come to be vitally important, if sometimes obliquely, to four different characters, who each tell their stories in portmanteau style. Nadia is a middlingly successful novelist in her 50s, difficult and introverted, who was given the desk in by Daniel Varsky, a Chilean friend of a friend.

There were lines that made me sigh: I will compare near future books with this one. There were two quotes where different characters refer to books that I read more than once then jotted down in my notebook: 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. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: I read differently know, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time.

View all 11 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. May 10, Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing Shelves: 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.

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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: 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: 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: 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 07, BlackOxford rated it really liked it Shelves: 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: Their stories touch each other just enough to amplify the empathy one feels for each. It intrigues me how she does this.

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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 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 4 comments. Oct 03, Jana rated it really liked it Shelves: 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. Mar 19, Dolors rated it really liked it Shelves: 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: 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: 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. 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: 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: 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.

Jul 28, Mizuki rated it liked it Shelves: 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 timeand many of them don't even have to be likable in order to hold your interest. I even feel like I'm reading an unfinished book when I turne Great House is a I like this book, but I can't give it four stars three stars read.

I even feel like I'm reading an unfinished book when I turned the last page. Nov 28, Liz rated it did not like it Shelves: I almost made it to page 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: Oct 30, Jennifer aka EM rated it liked it Shelves: 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 a Moments of soaring, heart-shattering prose.

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. 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. View all 15 comments. So it started with a desk and ended up being about a desk all along. 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 year-old, dissecting her characters and producing a stor So it started with a desk and ended up being about a desk all along. Krauss writes with the wisdom of an 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.

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Nov 21, Andy Miller rated it it was amazing. 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.

Great House by Nicole Krauss – review

The desk is taken to London and ends u The novel consists of four stories, three of which are connected by possession of an antique desk. 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.

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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 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 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.