Summary:
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?
My take: 1 look
Originally reviewed November 4, 2011
I agree with another reviewer in her surprise that this book won an award. While there is supposed to be a common thread running through the book, the desk, I found the writing to be disjointed, unrelated and completely boring. All of the characters were one-dimensional, unsympathetic and easy to leave.
I have another book on my list by Krauss, and will read it, but if I have the same impression, it will be the last book by this author that I read.
Not recommended.
