Great House [Paperback]

"Great House" is unashamedly literary in style and while undoubtedly not everyone's cup of tea, it's hard not to admire the cleverness of Krauss. It also covers such broad issues that it's not the easiest of books to sum up in a few words. Certainly, to enjoy this book you will need to have a tolerance for cerebral fiction. You will also need to appreciate the role of the book in commenting on aspects of the human condition rather than just telling a good story. This is most certainly not a plot driven book. You should also be prepared that the stories told are unremittingly dark, sad, and almost oppressively depressing. But while all of this sounds negative, the payoff is a book of exceptional cleverness and shot through with lovely and often beautifully observed writing about the human condition and in particular about memory. It would be wrong to say that it's cerebral with no heart: there's plenty of emotional heart here, but unless you buy into the cerebral game, then it's a book that will infuriate you before you reach it.

Effectively four short stories, each split into two parts, which echo into each other and overlap in different ways. Each is told from the first person perspective. It's fair to say that there isn't always as much distinction between the tones of voice as might be ideal. Some of the overlaps are obvious, or become obvious, others are more fleeting and subtle - mere suggestions. You pick up echoes of your own memories of earlier stories as the second halves unfold - they don't always come fully formed but often as fragments of a larger story - much like memory.

At the heart of the book is a great desk which both stands for the Great House symbolism of the Jewish concept, but also a term used by Freud to describe the workings of memory. It's the latter that works best for me, but Jewish readers may well get even more from the first reference as I'm sure some of the deeper symbolism went over my head a bit. The ownership of this desk though is just the link to bring the stories together and what each really explores is memory and stories - it's notable how many of the characters are writers or poets.

The stories include a reclusive writer in New York who inherits custody of the desk from a Chilean poet who is returning to fight the Pinochet regime, a London-based widower grieving for the loss of his wife (also a writer) whose life has a secret revealed to him only in his wife's Alzehimer's, a recently widowed Israeli frustrated at the lack of communication from his son, and finally another London-based story of Isabel's relationship with the strange Yoav and his equally mysterious sister, Leah both under the gaze of their furniture collecting father.

Yet none of these stories are told in a straightforward way. Krauss allows her narrators to fly around in time and to go off at tangents as they recall their stories.

If you read Krauss' last book, The History of Love then you will have a sense of her methods of story telling. If you didn't enjoy that, you will positively hate this! While there were moments of levity and lightness in The History of Love, there are none here. It's all pretty grim stuff but there is a certain beauty in the stories. Loss is a recurring theme though so it's always going to be quite dark.

It's not perfect, as I've tried to show, but it's a book that works on so many levels that the cleverness of the ideas carries through. I loved it and will certainly re-read it at a later date. If books that make you think, "I'm sure there's more to this than I'm getting" frustrate you, then this is not a book for you. But it's a book that made me think and I found involving as I tried to pin the threads together. Ideally, I'd give it four and a half stars (just some levity would have made all the difference, as would more differentiation between the narrative voices) but if you are up for a challenging book, then it has a huge amount going for it.

Haunting, evocative but in some ways problematically opaque exploration of memory, trauma and loss, and the role which physical objects can play in these experiences.

Like some other reviewers, I was left uncertain as to whether the book -- memorable and moving -- at the same time constituted less than the sum of its parts, which if the case might be appropriate to a novel dedicated to the subject of what is lost and missing, and the gaps and absences in people's lives. On the other hand, I personally was left feeling a little obtuse, as if, like the husband who narrates one strand of the novel, I too was left outside shivering and slightly blank outside a deep but unaccessed pool of content and secrets. This may well have been the intention, but at the same time did dilute the impact of a remarkably accomplished work for me personally as a reader.

Although engrossing and impressive at the time, Great House, over the following days, left less impression on me than I had expected. Nonetheless, a rich and extraordinary work.

Most of the synopses make reference to the desk being the linking factor between what seems to be several disparate short stories. That's true but don't expect anything as obvious as a piece of furniture being passed down to feature in the lives of all the various narrators. Some of them don't even know the desk exists but have a tenuous relationship to other characters who own it. That doesn't mean the book isn't carefully constructed. One of the stories appears to have no connection at all but then a link is revealed that ties it in cleverly with the first section.

I couldn't escape the sneaking feeling that this is something very good indeed, though I'm not sure I would buy it for anybody as an enjoyable read. I did admire it, sometimes dispassionately, and some sections engaged me on a more emotional level. The chapters about the Israeli man and his dysfunctional relationship with his son seemed to me to be the most powerful. His anger and his love in equal measures were moving and visceral.

One of the other reviewers complained that the voices of the various characters are not sufficiently distinctive. That is my main criticism. This is no more apparent than the section with Mrs Fiske. She is an elderly woman living in a two storey terraced house in Anfield with lace curtains and a back yard but her dialogue sounds the same as the authorial voice. I don't mean that Krauss should have attempted some clumsy accent expressed through misspellings, the reader's imagination should be able to supply how she would sound, but I come from Liverpool and I know that rhythms and patterns of speech there are different from other parts of Britain, let alone the US and Israel where other similar-sounding characters in the novel come from. At one stage Mrs Fiske reminisces about her adopted baby: `He used to cry so much, his face knotted, his mouth agape'. I just cannot hear those words coming out of that woman's mouth, and I don't mean she wouldn't have the vocabulary. I have never met anyone who would express herself in that way. All the characters share the same level of introspection and ability to endlessly intellectualise their emotions and have uncanny photographic memories that brings up the most microscopic detail when recounting the past. Me, I can hardly remember what happened yesterday. I've done some interviewing of older people about their past memories and you really struggle to get any level of detail. Here it all pours out.

Of course the whole book is very stylised and lyrical so perhaps that's deliberate and it may be unreasonable of me to look for realistic dialogue. This is undoubtedly a very cerebral novel. I suspect my reading of it was fairly superficial and I may need to wait for the York Advanced Notes before I fully understand all the symbolism and undercurrents. Meanwhile, I think I'll hedge my bets and give it five stars.