Great House

Nicole Krauss

feb 2011 · Penguin UK

Acerca de este libro electrónico

During the winter of 1972, a woman spends a single night with a young Chilean poet before he departs New York, leaving her his desk. It is the only time they ever meet. Two years later, he is arrested by Pinochet's secret police and never seen again. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair among her papers that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer has spent a lifetime reassembling his father's study, plundered by the Nazis from Budapest in 1944; now only one item remains to be found.
Connecting these lives is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. And as the narrators of Great House make their confessions, this desk comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.
Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?
Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.

Calificaciones y opiniones

This is an amazing book. The power and beauty of Krauss' prose, the careful way in which she composes the narrative threads that touch and embrace each other in this story, the subtle meanings that lie behind the meditations of these delicate and moving characters, left me speechless more than once. It is a profound reflection on the relationship between loss, love and the basis of community in a world where sense is constantly being injured or fractured by the shadow of violence and trauma. It is a declaration of the power that pain and grief have to create strong bonds between people, bonds that defy any sensation of isolation or orphanhood.I loved it and strongly recommend it to anyone interested in trauma literature or, more simply, in a beautifully written story about the hidden and revelatory power of loss, love and grief that, I believe, is extremely pertinent and illuminating.

Acerca del autor

Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestseller The History of Love, which was published by Penguin in 2005. It won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.