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Original Essays | September 17, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNGreat Houseby Nicole Krauss
AwardsStaff Pick
Nicole Krauss, author of the bestselling History of Love, showcases her brilliant storytelling yet again. Her artistic way of weaving a tale and the amazing characters she develops are beyond compare. It's no wonder she's featured on the New Yorker's 20 under 40 list for 2010. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. 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.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright PWyxz LLC)
Review:"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." New York Times Book Review
Review:"Krauss's 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." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:"Masterful....Another extraordinary example of what fiction can do...a brilliantly orchestrated, mesmerizing whole that explores memory, solitude and an aching sense of loss and longing. Evocative and moving." NPR
Review:"The most heartbreaking part of Great House...is having to finish it....As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you'll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive." Rachel Rosenblit, Elle
Review:"An ethereal mystery....For readers who love beautiful language and complex characters, Great House will be hard to put down." Ellen Shapiro, People magazine
Synopsis:A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through.
Synopsis:Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction
Winner of the 2011 ABA Indies Choice Honor Award in Fiction Winner of the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Award Shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize in Fiction A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through. "[An] elegiac novel...achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here [Krauss] 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." --Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The New York Times Book Review "This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent...Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow." --Publishers Weekly "[Krauss] writes of her characters' despair with striking lucidity...an eloquent dramatization of the need to find that missing piece that will give life its meaning."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "Krauss herself is a fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion, giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes." --Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR About the AuthorNicole Krauss was born in New York in 1974 and lives in Brooklyn. She has published in Esquire, the Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Called "one of the most impressive debuts of 2002" by Esquire, Man Walks Into a Room was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
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