A writing desk serves as Krauss's literary device to connect five striking vignettes. So, too, are the characters emotionally linked through lives that involve writing and reading, love overshadowed by loss, and connection outweighed by isolation. The book is narrated at a stately pace—which will be appreciated by the serious listener who might wish to stop the audio to write down a line or two—by Robert Ian MacKenzie (narrator of McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street series) who demonstrates that he can do wonders with material he can sink his teeth into. His performance as a British professor married to a reclusive writer is a marvel, and Alma Cuervo's evocation of a lonely author haunted by her relationship to a previous owner of the desk is affecting and nuanced. Listeners who enjoy lingering over a top-notch novel will be intellectually nourished by this audio. A Norton hardcover. (Oct.)
"Surely if there is one book each author is meant to write, then there might also be one book each reader is meant to read. For plenty of fans out there, Great House just might be that book."
"Artlessly lovely… the pleasure of reading this book is in its details, its intimation of sincerity, its quiet wisdom."
New York Press - Yevgeniya Traps
"Starred Review: Krauss’ 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."
"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."
Fresh Air, NPR - Maureen Corrigan
"While her prior, much-vaunted novel, The History of Love , was certainly fresh and winning, Great House strikes me as a richer, more seasoned exploration of the themes and images that bedevil Krauss… Krauss’ sentences are so beautiful, rendered in such simple, clear language, I had to stop to reread many."
The San Francisco Chronicle - Joan Frank
"Exquisite…Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters’ pain and struggles."
The Philadelphia Inquirer - Sharon Dilworth
"A novel brimming with insights into the human psyche…often haunting and ultimately rewarding."
Associated Press - Monica Rhor
"[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."
The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"A complex, richly imagined new novel… Krauss’s talent runs deep. And she cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany."
Huffington Post - Janet Byrne
"Steeped in place and memory, Great House is a worthy successor to Krauss’ earlier works, more complex and more challenging."
The Denver Post - Robin Vidimos
"…I was captivated by the first chapter, and never disappointed thereafter as the various voices chimed in and the intricate connections began to connect. Perhaps it has a special resonance for writers (the two "All Rise" sections in particular, were utterly devastating)—but at the same time I feel sure all kinds of readers will respond to it.... The richness of invention, the beauty of the prose, the aptness of her central images (oh, the desk!), the depth of feeling: who would not be moved?"
"Krauss’ third novel…is perhaps even more indicative [than The History of Love ] of her ability to weave intricate storylines, craft emotionally layered characters and expertly draw out the pain, difficulty, and extreme complexity of human relationships."
Jewcy.com - Juliet Linderman
"[The characters’] stunningly distinct and lively voices hold us captive to their versions of their lives. Krauss, who began her career as a poet, can do just about anything with the English language."
The Boston Globe - Ann Harleman
"Krauss’ organic scenes soar, she is stunning."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer - Karen R. Long
"[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."
The New York Times Book Review - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
"With grace and originality, Krauss writes of loss and many kinds of loneliness, the connections between memory and objects, between memory and identity, and about uncertainty."
Jewish Week - Sandee Brawarsky
"The most heartbreaking part of Great House , the third novel by Nicole Krauss, 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."
"Krauss has a unique way of assembling novels—baroque, complex, and with stunning tidiness that isn’t clear until the very last page. All the parts do fit together in the end. The shape they form is the ghastly Great House , and its walls are ideas that leave the reader reverberating."
TheAtlantic.com - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
"[A] brave new novel…[Krauss] has written one of the most lyrical novels I’ve read in a long time."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Mike Fischer
Delayed revelation is one of the author’s signatures, and in this, her third novel, she manages it with satisfying élan…Krauss’s organic scenes soar, she is stunning.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Krauss has a unique way of assembling novels—baroque, complex, and with stunning tidiness that isn’t clear until the very last page. All the parts do fit together in the end. The shape they form is the ghastly Great House , and its walls are ideas that leave the reader reverberating.”
Krauss’ 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)
Full of cogent insights…an exercise in kaleidoscopic storytelling, a novel that seeks to weave four groups of characters into a larger meditation on memory and loss.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
[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 - Wall Street Journal
Although most of her characters are prisoners of the past, 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 - NPR's Fresh Air
Ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative.
Joan Frank - San Francisco Chronicle
Sweeps you up…beautiful and mysterious.
Ann Harleman - Boston Globe
Exquisite…Krauss is a poetic stylist whose prose gives tremendous weight to her characters’ pain and struggles.
Sharon Dilworth - Philadelphia Inquirer
One of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation.
Sam Tanenhaus - New York Times Book Review
Starred Review. Krauss’ 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.
One of America's most important novelists and an international literary sensation.
Sam Tanenhaus - The New York Times Book Review
An ominous writing desk is pivotal to the lives of the narrators of this chronicle, whose relationships are obscured like puzzle pieces defying placement until studied from every angle. The multiple narrators' performances are powerful and are true to the ethnicity of their respective characters. Krauss's (nicolekrauss.com) languid third novel, a haunted mystery brimming with lyrical details, is a National Book Award fiction finalist; her previous novel, The History of Love (2005)—also available from Recorded Books—won the William Saroyan International Prize. Essential. ["An intense and memorable reading experience," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Norton hc, LJ 8/10.—Ed.]—Judith Robinson, Dept. of Lib. & Information Studies, Univ. at Buffalo
A battered wooden desk and the lives it touches form the link between characters in this engrossing exploration of life and loss, memory and guilt, Jewish culture and history, and the tenuousness of emotional connections. Perfect for audio, GREAT HOUSE employs talented narrators who endow each of the main characters with human fallibility, giving credibility to their fears, moments of cruelty, selfish hopes, and flashes of selflessness. Nadia borrows the desk from a young poet who disappears in Chile during the Pinochet regime. He got the desk from Lotte, a woman with a terrible secret. George Weisz spends his life reclaiming belongings seized from Jews by the Nazis during WWII. Beautifully read and artfully written, Krauss’s every sentence wraps itself around the heart. Prepare to be mesmerized. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
A many-drawered writing desk resonates powerfully but for different reasons with the various characters in this novel about loss and retrieval from Krauss (The History of Love , 2005, etc.).
This brain-stretching novel travels back and forth across years and continents. In 1972 New York, a young novelist named Nadia spends one magical evening with a Chilean poet, Daniel, who then returns to Chile. Daniel leaves in her care a desk he claims belonged toFederico García Lorca. Shortly afterward, he dies at the hands of Pinochet's secret police. In 1999 a young woman named Leah announces to Nadia that she is Daniel's daughter and wants his desk returned. The reclusive Nadia lets Leah, who resembles Daniel, ship the desk to her home in Jerusalem but is emotionally devastated afterward—the desk represents her writing life. Her sense of herself as a woman and a writer deeply shaken, she decides to visit Jerusalem. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, a retired lawyer yearns to connect to his son Dovik, who has left his own legal career in England to move in with his father after his mother's funeral. Barely speaking, Dovik remains a frustrating mystery to his father. Back in 1970 in London, an Oxford professor finds his jealousy pricked when his wife Lotte, a writer and Holocaust survivor, gives her writing desk to the young poet Daniel, an admirer of her work. Only later, learning that Lotte gave up a baby for adoption before she married, does he realize that Daniel became a surrogate for her lost son. In 1998 in London, Leah is living with her brother when she goes to New York in search of the desk. While the disparate characters do not necessarily interact, their choices affect one another over the course of decades.
Brainy and often lyrically expressive, but also elusive and sometimes infuriatingly coy; Krauss is an acquired taste.
