Great House
As seen:
By Nicole Krauss
avg rating
2 reviews
During the winter of 1972, a woman spends a single night with a young Chilean poet before he departs New York, leaving her his desk. It is the only time they ever meet. Two years later, he is arrested by Pinochet’s secret police and never seen again.
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St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 3rd February 2020.
Great house. Nicole Krauss.
In general the readers found this book rather difficult, and some gave up before the end – the word 'tedious' was a word used by more than one person. Others finished the book, but everyone seemed to have a problem with the multiple narrators and how they fitted together. On discussion, this problem was defined as being that these narrators were insufficiently different from each other, meaning that the reader couldn't remember who was who.
We talked about various themes that we saw in the book: children and fathers; over-indulged children; the Holocaust and the Yom Kippur War; survivor guilt and how people who had witnessed atrocities found it hard to move on with their lives; and writers, how they found it difficult to get on with their work, or when they did get on with it, the rest of their lives and their families suffered in consequence.
We also discussed the book's theme of furniture as heritage (Weisz, the furniture dealer, sees his work in the light of helping people who have lost families and possessions to reconstruct their childhood by selling them facsimiles of the furnishings from their youth). This applied particularly to the enormous desk in the story, which is passed on from character to character and which tends to dominate their houses and their lives. We all found this slightly baffling, but after further discussion, it was suggested that the desk represents Jewish memory and history, at the same time a valued heritage and a heavy burden.
Though this was not a popular book with this group, it did generate a lot of interesting debate.
On behalf of Norton Library Reading Group :-
The lives of several narrators are explored in this book, they are all connected by a desk of many drawers which features in each tale. This book is not an easy read and I have to say that I didn’t particularly enjoy it. The characters are all rather morose and I feel the author has over complicated them for no real reason. When you read a book you like to feel engaged with at least one of the characters but this didn’t happen for me. Some parts of the story worked better than others as a narrative and some parts only made sense as you neared the end of the story. All in all, I didn’t feel the stories were cohesive enough and on the whole felt “bitty”
