Great House by Nicole Krauss

Great House by Nicole Krauss is  a series of family stories with the common theme of a writing desk that somehow comes into their lives. Imagine what this desk has seen and what it would say if it could talk. Just like how Richard Powers infuses the idea of memory in trees in The Overstory, Krauss infuses her writing with the power of nostalgia in the items we surround ourselves with.

I think, dear readers, we can agree that I am more of a genre reader than I am a literature reader. I will wax on and on about the mermaid book and the dragon books, but I generally find contemporary fiction to be a bit of a slog. So when this book came up on my list, I sighed and took a stab at it.

I thought this book was absolutely fine. I feel like that's damning it with faint praise, but that's where I am. I didn't dislike reading it, but I didn't look forward to reading it, either. I thought the writing was good. I learned a lot. But I didn't fall in love with any of the characters or want to stick around in its world either. It was just fine.  Perfectly fine.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. (page 31)

Interesting. I always want to share the things I love with others, but I guess I can see how it could be something you'd want to keep close to yourself to avoid potential criticism.

He confided that despite the fact that his last book had won a prize (I never heard of it), he was having a terrible time. He couldn't get a paragraph out without condemning it to the trash. So what do you do? I asked. You want to know? he said. I'm asking, I told him. All right, he said, just between you and me, I'll tell you. He leaned across the table and whispered two words: Mrs. Kleindorf. What? I said. Just what I said, Mrs. Kleindorf. I'm not following you, I told him. I pretend I'm writing to Mrs. Kleindorf, he said. My seventh grade teacher. No one else is going to see it, I tell myself, only her. It doesn't matter that she's been dead already twenty-five years. I think of her kind eyes and the little red smiley faces she used to draw on my papers, and I begin to relax. And then, he said, I can write a little. (page 51)

Two points I'd like to make about this passage. 1) Teachers are so important, aren't they. 2) I once pondered the name of the Wisconsin city Baraboo, describing it in a car ride to my husband as "such a fun word to say." He suggested it was weird to call a proper noun a word instead of a name - he admitted proper nouns are words, of course, but just not something he'd call them. I felt vindicated by the above passage since Mrs. Kleindorf was referenced as "two words." 

The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn't like, or even a pressure to like them at all. (page 127)

Again, an interesting take on reading. Not one I necessarily share, but I thought it was a bit fascinating.

When you came home at last you were neither the soldier I had watched disappear into the crowd, nor the boy I knew. You were a kind of shell, emptied out of both of those people. (page 186)

War destroys so many lives.

There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and the only source is a stranger. (page 254)

One time I was having a terrible day and our car battery kept dying and I had to ask repeated strangers to help me jump the damn thing. It was a terrible day and one lady who was working at a gas station was SO NICE and SO HELPFUL and when I later took a thank you note and gift card over to her, it was clear she was having a bad day and my puny little offering nearly made her cry and then I was crying because she'd been so nice to me and sometimes we just need strangers to be kind.

Things I looked up:

Basically, this book revealed that I have a deep level of ignorance about world literature.

Nicanor Parra (page 9) - One of the most influential Chilean poets of the twentieth century (often spoke in the same sentence as Pablo Neruda) and was also a theoretical physicist who taught at universities for decades.

Lost notebooks of Pasternak (page 9) - Boris Pasternak is a famous Russian poet, novelist and translator, probably most famous for writing Doctor Zhivago and having to turn down a Nobel Prize for Literature under pressure from the Communist Party in Russia.  The KGB apparently seized letters and documents from Pasternak shortly after his death and refused to return them to his family.

Death of Ungaretti (page 9) - Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian writer. He died in 1970 of a lung clot.

Suicide of Weldon Kees (page 9) - Kees was a Renaissance man, having credits as an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, and filmmaker. In July 1955, his car was found abandoned near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There was no trace of Kees - no body, no notes - and his disappearance remains an unsolved mystery. 

Disappearance of Arthur Cravan (page 9) - Cravan was a Swiss writer, poet, boxer, and artist. One source wrote "neither a good poet nor a good pugilist" which sort of made me chuckle because, hey, aren't we all just trying to figure out what we're good at in life? Anyway, he vanished off the coast of Mexico in 1918 in a old, small, cheaply made craft. He never returned to port or arrived at his destination and it was presumed he capsized or drowned in a storm at sea. However, there is some speculation that he faked his own death. (I went down the rabbit hole on this one. He was Oscar Wilde's nephew and the speculation that he faked his own death is wild.)

Macher (page 51) - A person who gets things done.

Afikomen (page 55) - The name of a portion of of matzah eaten at the conclusion of the Passover meal seder. In some Jewish communities, there is a custom of children "stealing" the afikomen and hiding it and the "ransom" is a treats and sweets.

Joseph Brodsky (page 145) - Russian and American poet and essayist.

Yehuda Amichai (page 145) - An Israeli poet and essayist.