Scan barcode
A review by karieh13
Great House by Nicole Krauss
4.0
Haunting. It’s the best and most accurate word I can think of to describe “Great House”. Per Dictionary.com - as a verb, it means “to disturb or distress.” As a noun, it means “remaining in the consciousness, not quickly forgotten.” Both of these definitions prove true after reading Nicole Krauss’s novel.
To be haunted is to have things happen to you that are unexplainable – outside of the realm of the everyday world. If someone asked me what “Great House” was about – I don’t think I’d be able to give a straightforward plot synopsis. I was always just a bit lost, having characters and events hovering just outside my realm of understanding – feeling as if the truth was playing tricks on me and that if I just read a bit more carefully, I’d be able to bring things into view. Once I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do so, I let the thoughts and the characters drift through me, and stopped thinking about from whence they came or how they related to the others in the book.
“We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”
The characters are linked, in this novel, by a desk. At least that’s what I think. What I know is that they are linked by memories, of longing and regrets, of lives that ended too quickly and lives that weren’t lived the way one had expected.
“But I hardly noticed the conversation that swelled around me, so absorbed was I by the expression I’d glimpsed the moment before the girl had buried her face in her mother’s hair, which filled me with awe and also grief, and I knew then, Your Honor, that I would never be that to anyone, the one who in a single motion could rescue and bring peace.”
There is a deep layer of grief in this book. These characters live, true, but many of them seem like they are living in the shadows of what should, what might have been.
“Look at him, she used to say, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet in his soul, all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words.”
Too, this is a book about words. About readers and writers, about the power of words written and spoken. About how lives are shaped by events experienced both firsthand and pulled from the page.
“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 really meant, Do you actually think anything you write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight though 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 were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated that nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth.”
I realize as I skim over these words, that I’ve given no indication as to who each character is, as to where in the plot they occur (or what the plot is at all, for that matter), and that seems fitting.
For while this book is haunting in that it is difficult to grasp, is disturbing…it is also certainly “not quickly forgotten”. While I may not remember the plotline in a way I can describe it to a person plucking it from my bookshelf and asking “What’s this about?” – I can remember the grace of the words and the feeling behind them. Visions such as these will haunt me:
“I clung to his waist, the wind caught his hair, we drove through the streets past the city’s otherworldly residents I’d come to know well, the haredim in their dusty black coats and hats, the mothers loading their gaggle of children whose clothes trailed hundreds of loose threads as if the children had been ripped unfinished from the loom, the pack of Yeshiva boys who slammed pas at a stoplight squinting as if newly let out of a cave, the old man stooped over his walker with the Filipino girl clutching the baggy elbow of his sweater, pulling a loose piece of yarn that she wrapped around her hand, unraveling him until his last words would be pulled out of him like a knot, him and her and the Arab sweeping the gutter, all of then unaware that we who sailed past them were only an apparition, ghosts more out of time than they.”
To be haunted is to have things happen to you that are unexplainable – outside of the realm of the everyday world. If someone asked me what “Great House” was about – I don’t think I’d be able to give a straightforward plot synopsis. I was always just a bit lost, having characters and events hovering just outside my realm of understanding – feeling as if the truth was playing tricks on me and that if I just read a bit more carefully, I’d be able to bring things into view. Once I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do so, I let the thoughts and the characters drift through me, and stopped thinking about from whence they came or how they related to the others in the book.
“We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”
The characters are linked, in this novel, by a desk. At least that’s what I think. What I know is that they are linked by memories, of longing and regrets, of lives that ended too quickly and lives that weren’t lived the way one had expected.
“But I hardly noticed the conversation that swelled around me, so absorbed was I by the expression I’d glimpsed the moment before the girl had buried her face in her mother’s hair, which filled me with awe and also grief, and I knew then, Your Honor, that I would never be that to anyone, the one who in a single motion could rescue and bring peace.”
There is a deep layer of grief in this book. These characters live, true, but many of them seem like they are living in the shadows of what should, what might have been.
“Look at him, she used to say, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet in his soul, all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words.”
Too, this is a book about words. About readers and writers, about the power of words written and spoken. About how lives are shaped by events experienced both firsthand and pulled from the page.
“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 really meant, Do you actually think anything you write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight though 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 were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated that nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth.”
I realize as I skim over these words, that I’ve given no indication as to who each character is, as to where in the plot they occur (or what the plot is at all, for that matter), and that seems fitting.
For while this book is haunting in that it is difficult to grasp, is disturbing…it is also certainly “not quickly forgotten”. While I may not remember the plotline in a way I can describe it to a person plucking it from my bookshelf and asking “What’s this about?” – I can remember the grace of the words and the feeling behind them. Visions such as these will haunt me:
“I clung to his waist, the wind caught his hair, we drove through the streets past the city’s otherworldly residents I’d come to know well, the haredim in their dusty black coats and hats, the mothers loading their gaggle of children whose clothes trailed hundreds of loose threads as if the children had been ripped unfinished from the loom, the pack of Yeshiva boys who slammed pas at a stoplight squinting as if newly let out of a cave, the old man stooped over his walker with the Filipino girl clutching the baggy elbow of his sweater, pulling a loose piece of yarn that she wrapped around her hand, unraveling him until his last words would be pulled out of him like a knot, him and her and the Arab sweeping the gutter, all of then unaware that we who sailed past them were only an apparition, ghosts more out of time than they.”