Great House
By Nicole Krauss
W.W. Norton
October 2010
289pp

The Short of It:

With its winding, spinning narrative, Great House manages to pull you in, only to be pushed away with a firm hand later.

The Rest of It:

I have mixed feelings about Great House. The story centers around a desk as it travels from owner to owner. To some, the desk is just a mere vessel to write letters at. To others, it is a more important piece, vital to the creative writing process. This wooden desk is quite unique, in that it contains 19 drawers which allow the owner to secret away little bits of life. Large and imposing, this desk seems to loom over its owners when they are in possession of it, and remind them of their past lives when it’s gone.

Krauss weaves in and out of different narratives going back and forth in time. The structure of the novel is quite complex and takes some time to get used to. It took many passes at reading the novel for me to get a feel for her style. I find this to be the case with most Literary Fiction, but with Great House, the extra effort didn’t reward me in the way that I expected it would. The story fell flat and the some of the characters lacked depth.

The one storyline that I was very taken with, is the one where Lotte’s husband finds out that his wife has secrets.  I was completely absorbed by that story, but with the weaving narrative, once you find yourself absorbed, you are then suddenly pushed back into a different narrative. This gave the novel a disjointed feeling. Not to say that the transitions weren’t smooth, they were, but it’s like watching a riveting TV show while your children are yapping incessantly at you. You simply want to go back to the story… not be pulled away from it and forced to look elsewhere.

After re-reading the last third of the novel three times, I did experience the sense of loss that I felt the author was trying to convey. The desk becomes a Jewish symbol of survival and serves as a reminder of love and loss. The last third of the book is very powerful and thought-provoking but the novel as a whole felt a bit jagged around the edges. I didn’t feel that the stories were fully explored and it left me with an empty, unfinished feeling.

I read this for the 2010 Indie Lit Awards and although I do have some issues with how it was pieced together, I appreciate the complexity of the novel itself.

Source: Purchased