It's easy - indeed, a pleasure - to read, but despite the wonderful prose - consistently fluent and clear, and scattered with images, sentences and passages that particularly sparkle - and strong narrative voices and emotional undertows running through the book, Great House doesn't readily or ever fully offer up its secrets and deeper meanings; in that sense, it's much like the towering desk that is its structuring metaphor and pivotal plot object, locked drawer and all.
The book is carefully constructed around that central object and idea, its crucial absences, repetitions, losses and doublings finally interlocking - and at the same time unlocked by Weisz's final disclosures - at novel's end, though with at least one crucial element left unsaid (locked), I think, namely the question of who the father of Lotte's child was. Someone - I can't remember who - once said to me that they thought the test of books with fragmented, non-linear structures was whether they would still be good if the plot were instead presented from start to finish; Great House is all the rebuttal to that idea that's needed, its intricate construction designed to embody its thematic and narratival preoccupations.
Unlike Man Walks Into A Room and The History of Love, there is no overwhelming climactic ending, but only having read the last sentence did I feel that the pieces were beginning to fit; thinking about the book, and flipping back through it again, it seemed me that a buried phrase almost exactly halfway through the book, Isabel in a single sentence referring to a "later' involving her and Yoav, suggested that perhaps, Weisz's vision for the future of his children, Yoav and Leah, with its hint of resolution, might come to pass. It's an aptly subtle suggestion; the other points at which the characters' various stories are left are left similarly unresolved, poised - Nadia's encounters with Weisz and then Dov, Arthur's internal and external paths to something approaching true understanding of the necessary gaps in his life with Lotte, the haunting appearances and absence of Daniel.
I liked Great House a lot; I'll forgive a lot for writing as sustainedly good as Krauss', and indeed, there's nothing here to forgive. There are deep undercurrents in it, and it's moving and poignant without ever being straightforwardly so, and Krauss' ability here to keep the many interconnected themes and underlying metaphors which shape her novel and its characters' lives is impressive. Great House is very good indeed.
The book is carefully constructed around that central object and idea, its crucial absences, repetitions, losses and doublings finally interlocking - and at the same time unlocked by Weisz's final disclosures - at novel's end, though with at least one crucial element left unsaid (locked), I think, namely the question of who the father of Lotte's child was. Someone - I can't remember who - once said to me that they thought the test of books with fragmented, non-linear structures was whether they would still be good if the plot were instead presented from start to finish; Great House is all the rebuttal to that idea that's needed, its intricate construction designed to embody its thematic and narratival preoccupations.
Unlike Man Walks Into A Room and The History of Love, there is no overwhelming climactic ending, but only having read the last sentence did I feel that the pieces were beginning to fit; thinking about the book, and flipping back through it again, it seemed me that a buried phrase almost exactly halfway through the book, Isabel in a single sentence referring to a "later' involving her and Yoav, suggested that perhaps, Weisz's vision for the future of his children, Yoav and Leah, with its hint of resolution, might come to pass. It's an aptly subtle suggestion; the other points at which the characters' various stories are left are left similarly unresolved, poised - Nadia's encounters with Weisz and then Dov, Arthur's internal and external paths to something approaching true understanding of the necessary gaps in his life with Lotte, the haunting appearances and absence of Daniel.
I liked Great House a lot; I'll forgive a lot for writing as sustainedly good as Krauss', and indeed, there's nothing here to forgive. There are deep undercurrents in it, and it's moving and poignant without ever being straightforwardly so, and Krauss' ability here to keep the many interconnected themes and underlying metaphors which shape her novel and its characters' lives is impressive. Great House is very good indeed.
