Het grote huis (original 2010; edition 2010)

In the beginning of this novel I was irked. By the middle of the novel I was curious how it would all fit together. Throughout the entire novel I felt lonely and sad, letting the language wash over me and leave me alone in a room reading the lovely sentences only Nicole Krauss can construct.

A novel about more than just a desk, it is the story of how, even though we are with other people we are always alone.

I really loved this book. I didn't start out loving it the way I started out loving "Man Walks Into a Room" or "History of Love" but after awhile I fell in love with the words and the way that I thought I knew what was happening but then discovered at the end of the book, I really had no idea.

A really great book with some very interesting twists, I'm glad I wrote some notes in the margins for the next time I embark on reading "Great House" by Nicole Krauss. ( )

I guess I will give this another go.

This is a great effort with gorgeous language (it took me forever just to type out all of my favorite quotes this time) and a real strong sense of each character. What is not quite clear is how much Krauss intended for each character to be connected. One thing is clear and that is each character is united around a mystical desk that seems to inspire a writer's words to all come together to make sense when without it, everything seems to fall apart. The desk is supposedly one that belonged to the poet Lorca and is passes amongst each character in an interesting way. And, in many ways, the similarity between the characters is that they are all dealing with a loss of some sort. The older novelist, Nadia, deals with a loss of her writing abilities and her beauty with the aging process. The older poet, Lotte, deals with a loss of her memory and with her first born son she gave up for adoption. Lotte's husband deals with the loss of her and the loss of potential for a relationship that could have been all the more honest and intimate if Lotte had divulged and given more. Many characters deal with the loss of a human being, whether it be due to political upheaval and Pinochet or an accident or a death at the end of life...death is never simple and it is hard to move on. There is a thickness in these words when dealing with the aging process as well. There is also a rich sense of family and Jewish culture. Where the book fails is that it doesn't entirely make it clear if perhaps these characters are even more connected. Can Leah Weisz be Daniel's Varsky's daughter and how so if her father is still alive and is someone different? Can Daniel Varsky be Lotte's son when the son she gave up for adoption passed away in seemingly some other accident? It is also unclear how some of the characters obtain such a glorious desk. It may be a fault in myself as a reader that I want to make sure I understand each connection clearly in how far and deep the ties reach...however, the hint of these kinds of things without closure does tend to drive me a little mad and I understand the reviews that criticize the novel for its somewhat disjointed quality. Still, I found it very worth reading and fascinating. Each character is completely memorable and believable and their journeys are worth exploring for many to help gain perspective on one's own life. I anticipate gaining more insight into each of their experiences as I age.


******

Memorable quotes:

pg. 33 "A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a slightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrived at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away. The pauses between words became longer, when for an instant the momentum of pressing thought into language faltered and a dark spot of indifference bloomed. I suppose its what I've battled most often in my life as a writer, a sort of entropy of care or languishing of will, so consistently, in fact, that I barely paid it any attention-a pull to give in to an undertow of speechlessness. But now often I became suspended in these moments, they grew longer and wider, and sometimes it became impossible to see the other shore. And when I finally got there, when a word came along like a lifeboat, and then another and another, I greeted them with a faint distrust, a suspicion that took root and did not confine itself to my work."

pg. 35 "You make good use of death."

pg. 36 "I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which actually meant, Do you actually think what you write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life was somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated this nuclear winter, I sat back with a self satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth."

pg. 38 "When you're awake, you're like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids."

pg.44 "One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon."

pg.47 "You told me a convoluted story about four, six, maybe eight people all lying in rooms joined by a system of electrodes and wires to a great white shark. All night the shark floats suspended in an illuminated tank dreaming the dreams of these people. No, no the dreams, the nightmares, the things too difficult to bear..."

pg 49 "Dad, he said, his voice unraveling like a ribbon dropped from a roof."

pg. 55 I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without."

pg. 65 "You wanted to write about a shark that takes the brunt of human emotions."

pg. 68 "From a young age, you tirelessly searched for and collected suffering."

pg. 95 "...just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions and millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no , it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?"

pg. 98 "A certain look came over Lotte's face, a look I'd seen many times before, and which I can only describe as a kind of stillness, as if everything that normally existed near the surface had retreated into the depths. A moment passed. I felt something one from time to time experiences with those one is intimate with, when the distance that all the while folded up like a Chinese paper toy suddenly springs open between you."

pg. 106 "Pages seemed to drift out of their own accord and migrate across the floor, like a paper autumn staged by a bored child."

pg. 107 "But no matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was that beautiful animal (a moose) that strode with silent footfalls through the forest, an animal that didn't speak but knew all and looked with great sadness and pain on the ravages of human life, against its own kind and every other. At one point I even wondered whether fatigue was making me hallucinate, but then I thought to myself, No, this is what happens when you get old, time abandons you and all your memories become involuntary."

pg. 108 "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing, as Archilochus said, but what was it?"

pg. 139 "I began to think of their talent, if one can call it that, as something borrowed from ghosts."

pg. 154 "..the boy's feral hideaway reeked of isolation and loneliness."

pg. 172 "My words, to you, are atmospheric at most: They come through vaguely, like the twitter of birds and the creak of the old trees, and, as far as I can tell, like these things they require no response from you. "

pg. 173 "I'm rapidly approaching my end. I will not come back in the form of migrating birds, or pollen dust, or some ugly, debased creature befitting my sins. All that I am, all that I was, will harden over into ancient geology. And you will be left alone in it...While I'm buried in a hole voice of all feeling, you will live on in an afterlife of pain."

pg.175 I still possess powers of interrogation and can still fathom oblivion."

pg. 178 "In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry."

pg. 182 "I even felt, God knows how, a strange compassion for that great, suffering shark...I would be left in the dark, not knowing what would happen next. Only that shark was getting sicker and sicker. Knowing what Beringer knew, but which he kept from the dreamers in their windowless rooms: that the shark wouldn't live forever.:

pg. 195 "We move like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone."

pg. 196 "Overnight, a tiny spot of darkness had lodged in the vision of my right eye. It was just a speck but this little void drove me crazy, everything I looked at was marred by it. I started to panic. What if another spot appeared, and then another? Like being buried alive one shovel of dirt at a time, until there was only a prick of light left, and then nothing."

pg, 202 "I dragged a chair across the floor (I still remember the sound it made, a long scrape that gouged the silence)..."

pg, 237 "I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged how I described it...Only before God do we stand without stories."

pg. 257 "I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness."

pg. 272 "I put down my book, carefully marking the page with a bookmark. Lotte had always put her books down open-faced and when we first met I used to tell her that I could hear the little high pitched cry as its spine was broken. "

pg. 281 "I sat there for many long hours into the night. The fire died down. The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark."

pg. 289 "One day a child will be born. A child whose provenance is the union of a woman and a riddle."



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have ebook version

Beautiful writing at parts. Some semblance of mysterious life brought into conceivable burst of thought. Much hidden. Much intertwined with small links, intuition covering the links, embellishing them perhaps. Something immutable is hidden under here; otherwise, it's just filler. Regardless, I felt some emotion in this book. A sense of something unwinding, but the end left things unwound. Perhaps that's thematic, most likely considering the full brunt of what these characters think and think and think, but to me, a reader, it's kind of a let down. ( )