I finished Great House by Nicole Krauss and fell in love all over again with the talent in which she orchestrates words into universal truths. I am a page bender…just the bottom tips…when I find something worthy of sharing, noting, re-reading and re-reading… and this book has many a turned corner.
Great House is a collection of stories that are weaved together by a desk, not just any desk, but a desk that imposes itself on the lives it inhabits. The symbolism in this desk is nothing short of awe-inspiring. This is the story of a desk which absorbs the echoes of all its owners, the love lost, the silence, the darkness. It inhabits every space dauntingly and refuses to be ignored. It travels from one person to another, leaving abruptly, staying awkwardly, intruding on the most private thoughts shared in earnest… snatching moments meant for no one to see. It is as human as any person within the story and all that it sees and hears and is present for is found in the nitty gritty of the people’s lives… the complicated, the intricate. This desk absorbs the memories, the moments in the heavy of its grain, in its secret drawers filled with odds & ends of its every owner.
The aging woman who gives of herself to her writing at this desk. The spirited Chilean poet who is willing to give up everything for the good of his people. The enduring Holocaust survivor helping piece together the shards of other survivor’s lives through lost but not forgotten furniture. His children splintered from his cause left confused and bonded in a profound way to one another. The father wanting so desperately to reconnect with his son before his life fades away. An elderly woman losing herself into dementia as her husband stands helplessly by and the desk is there to collect each story, to tie them together, to hold the pain, the secrets, the love, the loss in a way that only something inanimate could without corroding from the inside out.
This is the story of complicated love, and there is no other kind. Of loss. And the human capacity for coping in infinitely creative ways. The legacies we leave for our children, for our spouses, for our parents… for anyone who crosses our path and how our pasts forge within us something immutable, something that can and will rub off on others. This is the universal story of losing someone we love or realizing we never had them in the first place. A story of how to move forward, how to collect the traces we leave behind or those left for us to follow … the trail of love, and choosing to live again. This is the story of aging, of growing, of fitting in your own skin speckled with the dusted memories of all those you encounter.
Three random quotes I collected from Great House,
“He, who ever he was, was part of her past, and like the rest it had sunk away into the dark, irretrievable depths of her.”
“Alone, I could slip into a kind of stillness, into a place like that bog those children once drew, where faces rise up out of the elements, and all is quiet, like the moment just before the arrival of an idea, a stillness and peace I’ve only ever felt when alone.”
“I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.”
Tags: Great House, Great House by Nicole Krauss, History of Love, Nicole Krauss
