Great House starts off confusing and compelling: “All Rise,” the first chapter, opens like this:
Talk to him.
Your Honor, in the winter of 1972 R and I broke up, or I should say he broke up with me. (3)
As the narrator continues we learn more about her: her career as a writer, her failed relationship with R, the massive desk she gets from a young Chilean poet who’s later tortured and killed by Pinochet’s government, her failed marriage with S, her Upper-West-Side NYC life, her worries about how she’s put her writing above family/friends/lovers, her introversion and solitude (which sometimes brings peace and sometimes brings loneliness and sometimes simply is). We learn that the desk, her trustiest companion for decades, has recently left her life, that it’s been reclaimed by a young woman who’s found her name and address somehow, a woman who lives in Jerusalem and claims she’s the Chilean poet’s daughter. We learn that the narrator’s in Jerusalem as she’s telling this story, and then the narrative shifts, and then shifts again, then again, so that each of the book’s first four chapters tells another story, though the stories are connected by the desk and by themes of silence, secrets, loss, and memory.
We hear from a man in Jerusalem whose wife has died, and whose adult son, who wanted to be a writer and with whom the man had always had a difficult relationship, has come back from London for the funeral. We hear from a British academic whose wife, a writer, has also died; she owned the desk at one point, and like the first narrator was given to silences, even in her marriage. We hear from a woman who had an intense relationship, during grad school, with an Israeli man who’s the son of an antiques dealer who specializes in finding and reclaiming furniture taken from Jewish homes and families during WWII. The second part of the book picks up most of these stories again, and keeps on following the desk, and through it all there’s Krauss’s prose, which has its moments of being almost too precious, too studied, but is mostly lyrical and lovely, graceful whether it’s melancholy or thoughtful or funny. (“Outside, water was suspended in the air like a science experiment—an experiment that had been going on for thousands of years, and constituted the weather in England.” (p 126)).
Leave a Reply