Nicole
Krauss announced herself as a writer to watch out for with her second novel, The History
of Love. The History of Love was published in 2005 to great critical
acclaim and was a world-wide bestseller.
It won Krauss many fans (I count myself as one of them). It was a very
clever novel characterized, amongst other things, by its plot-structure. To
call the plot of The History of Love puzzling would be an understatement. Trying
to solve the riddle of the plot is a rewarding exercise in itself as you read
the novel; and Krauss brought all the seemingly disparate strands of the novel
very neatly towards its climax. The History of Love was a graceful, fresh novel
of great poignancy.
Six years
after the success of The History of Love Krauss published
Great
House in which Krauss attempts another tale of mystery and suspense,
but not with the same success as she did in The History of Love.
Like The
History of Love, Great House is built around multiple
narratives at the centre of which is an old desk.
The novel
opens with Nadia who is a moderately successful American writer of Roman a Clefs. Nadia has written most of
her novels at a massive desk that was given her years ago by a Chilean poet
Daniel Varsky. Varsky’s anme was suggested to Nadia by a common friend who knew
that Nadia, recently split from her partner, was looking for furniture. Nadia
and Daniel meet only once before Varsky goes back to Chile where, two years
later he disappears, assumed to have been tortured and killed by the secret
service of the then Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. In the present,
more than two decades after Varsky’s disappearance, Nadia is contacted by a
young woman who calls herself Leah Varsky. Leah tells Nadia that she is the
daughter of Varsky; apparently Varsky had a brief affair with Leah’s mother—who
now lives in Israel—before he went back to Chile and disappeared. Leah wants to
know whether Nadia still ahs Varsky’s desk with her. Without making any further
inquiries about this supposed daughter of Varsky Nadia allows Leah to collect
the humongous desk which has been in her apartment for several years; however,
afterwards she is assailed by doubts soon after and decides to travel to Israel
to make further investigations. Nadia’s narrative is addressed to someone whom
she refers to as ‘Your Honour’.
Next the
reader is hurtled into a long monologue—bristling with barely concealed fury—of
a retired Jewish lawyer named Aaron who has recently become a widower. Aaron has two sons—Uri and Dovik. His
relationship with his younger son, Dovik, is troubled. Dovik has returned from
London, where he had lived for several years and was a judge, to Israel to
attend his mother’s funeral. He has informed his father—with whom he has, for
years, involved in entrenched combat—that he has resigned his position in
London and now wishes to live for the foreseeable future with him. The link of
Aaron and Dovik to the novel’s plot does not become clear until the end.
The third
narrator in the Great House is another widower named Arthur Bender. Bender has
been married for decades to a survivor of the Holocaust named Lotte Berg, who,
like Nadia, from the first narrative segment, is a writer, albeit of literary
short stories. Originally from Nuremberg, Lotte lost her family in the
Holocaust and managed to escape the camp just in time to arrive in
England. Lotet and Arthus are childless
and Lotte, who was almost 30 when she first met Arthur, rarely talked about her
past. The only possession of any significance Lotte has when Arthur first meets
her is a huge, slightly menacing desk. The desk travels with Lotte wherever she
goes and she too has written her stories at it, until, in 1972, she is visited
by a young Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky who announces himself as a fan of
her work. Lotte gives the desk as a present to Daniel. As Arthus Bender’s narrative continues the
reader learns that Lotte has died of Alzheimer’s Disease. In the final phase of
her illness Lotte has said something that has made Arthus question the
foundation of their marriage. Lotte had a son before she met Arthur, whom she
gave away for adoption. The son would have been the same age as that of Daniel
Varsky who met Lotte in the 1970s. Arthur is obsessed with this son of his wife
whom he never met; he wants to find out more about him.
Next ‘I’ in
the narrative stream in Izzy or Isabel, an American student studying at Oxford
in the 1990s, who meets Yoav and Leah Weisz. The brother and sister have led a
peripatetic existence as they are hauled from city to city, across continents
by their widower father, George. Yoav and Leah were born and raised in Israel
where their father still lives in a family house. Izzy falls in love with Yoav
but soon figures out that the siblings have an uneasy, almost oppressive
relationship with their father who is in the habit of descending upon them at
short notices. George is an Antique dealer. His speciality is tracking down
properties confiscated from Jews by the Nazis before and during the Holocaust.
George is an Hungarian Jew and, after his family perished in the Holocaust, has
made his way to Israel at the end of the Second World War. George’s family home
in Budapest used to have a study which had a desk at which his father used to
write. It has been George’s life-long mission to create the study of his
Budapest home in his Jerusalem home by tracing down all the objects from that
study.
The
plotting of Great House is fractured. As the reader goes from one segment
of the story, a novella in itself, to the next, a kind of suspense builds up.
You are eager to find out how the different strands of the narrative would
connect; you want to know whether the different narrators of the story are
connected with one another—and with the desk—in a meaningful way. Alas! That
never happens. Too many strands are left unexplained. The desk Lotte Berg gives
to Daniel Varsky ends up with Nadia, who gives it to Leah Weisz who poses as Daniel’s
daughter at the behest of her father who is tracking down a desk belonging to
his father. Why does he send his daughter to Nadia to obtain the desk which he
ought to know—if he is as good an antique hunter as he goes around telling
people—cannot be his. The relationship of Aaron the Israeli lawyer and his son
Dovik to the main plot is so superficial—almost incidental— that you wonder
whether it was really necessary to devote so many pages to that strand. Daniel
Varsky, the Chilean poet, is central to at least two narrative segments—Nadia’s
and Arthur Bender’s. His entry into the lives of Arthur and Lotte is so
contrived, it lacks credibility. As to why Lotte decides to give Daniel, whom
she has never met until then—he is indeed a fan of her stories and has
travelled to London to meet her— her huge desk, the only memento of her
vanished family, is left unexplained. The trail of her adopted away son—he is
not Daniel Varsky and is adopted by a couple in Liverpool—is another loose,
unnecessary, and irrelevant strand.
The prose
style of Great House is heavy, ponderous, melancholy, and, with the exception
of Aaron’s narrative, monotonous. All the narrators—even the scouser who
adopted Lotte Berg’s son and has probably not travelled beyond a five-mile
radius of Anfield—speak with the same measured tone and make profound
observations on the human condition. And they all sound the same, as if they
are all on the psychiatrist’s couch. It is as if Krauss is unable to change
gear when writing for characters removed for one another by upbringing,
continents, and generations. (A novel that comes to my mind is David Mitchell’s
superlative Cloud Atlas, which, like Great House, has different narrative
voices. To me, it is a sign of Mitchell’s great talent as a writer that he
takes on and sheds different prose styles when writing different sections of
that novel. ) It is exquisite writing, mind, but even as you read page after
page of brilliantly constructed sentences, it does not somehow ring echt; the experience wearies you; and
the writing does not touch your heart.
Great House is a novel of ideas. It is a
meditation on loss, grief, and the soul crushing burden of memories. But it is
an elusive novel. Reading Great House is akin to listening to
someone who is ever so slightly out of focus and tells you about almost
everything, leaving out the vital pieces of information, which leaves you with
a sense of partialness.
