Above: a great illustration of Great House in http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/10/entertainment/la-ca-nicole-krauss-20101010.
Krauss (born 1974) is quite different from the authors I have mentioned in this blog before. Great House manifests the beginning of another series of books from a semester I spent in Belgium. The course was less organized than those I had taken before but provided a great change for me. I really enjoyed the topic of diaspora; even as much that I told my mother that I would probably be interested in writing something like a thesis on a topic qualifying under the theme in the future.
Krauss is a newyorker with Yewish roots: I guess her inheritance is a really big influence on her books, especially this one. She is more of a short story writer, and even this book could visibly divided into 4 short stories, that are loosely connected by some characters and items. Once you start noticing those re-occurring items, the novel gets more and more interesting – it’s a mystery, a puzzle of many pieces that the reader has to connect.
I remember sitting in a classy little café in Liegé with one of my course friends, trying to draw a plan on the clues and different connections, desperately trying to find the year numbers for different events, only to find that there is still a big massive gap left straight in between the story that Krauss is telling. The story is of a table.
The story starts with a ‘sub-story’, if you like, of a writer in New York who has been writing behind this big, threatening table that she got from a revolutionary Chilean poet that had gone missing after an encounter with the Pinochet’ police. She cherishes the table and believes that it gives her inspiration, although, her stories are very dark. One of them talking about a mother who burnt her children in a locked car, and the other one of her own father in a very embarrassing manner. The table is claimed by someone who calls herself the revolutionary’s daughter.
In London, a husband of a dying wife discovers a secret – the woman had had a son before their marriage who she had given away. She had never mentioned him before. She, too, had had the table at some point, but she gave it away to a certain Chilean poet, a man who was around the same age as her son could have been.
The third sub-story is of a grumpy father who is thinking back to how he mistreated one of his sons and never understood him. The son had come back after taking part in a war, getting an education and living his own life – just to take care of his father. But he had not come back the day his father wanted to ask forgiveness from him.
And the fourth sub-story is of a Yewish family. A father, who trades furniture. He plays on the fact that there are items that people really miss, and he goes around the whole world to find these items and bring them back to the original owners. Behind his doings is a motive to find all the items belonging to his father’s study in Budapest before the war. Only one item is missing – a table. His children are not making it easy for him to find it.
The stories are in two cycles. First, one of the parts of each of the stories is told, and then, the stories are told again. It is really fascinating and even addictive to find out where the table was, connecting so many different people who all found something in this piano for themselves.
It really makes you think of what people are really obsessed with or what they care about the most.
rReadings 