Nicole Krauss is a master carpenter in the craft of ideas

Great House by Nicole Hrauss
Hermione Eyre10 April 2012

Great House

If Nicole Krauss's 2005 hit novel The History of Love was a deft, wry conjuring trick, her latest is more like master carpentry. It is a heavier, more ponderous piece of work - but it is built to last.

The History of Love was Jewish magical realism which floated light and jabbed deep. It stayed just the right side of sentimental even though its twin protagonists were a resourceful child and a dying old man - who, inevitably, met on a Central Park bench in a final heartwarming scene.

Pages from an imaginary book, The History of Love, fluttered through the narrative with a fine Borgesian disregard for the rules of time and space.

Translated into 25 languages and nominated for the Orange Prize, it earned her a place on the New Yorker's once-a-decade list of 20 novelists under 40, which also included her husband Jonathan Safran Foer. While he has, of late, been proselytising for vegetarianism (Eating Animals, 2009) and cutting up his favourite book, Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, into a post-modern word-doily (Tree of Codes, 2010) Krauss is in more sombre, powerful literary mode.

Great House is told by four different voices, all thoroughly well-crafted and slotted together, and unlocked by a final key chapter. The object that unites all the stories is a writing desk.

One character is a writer who has not so much a sliver of ice in her heart as a full-on cardiovascular glacier - when her husband tries to save their marriage, she describes his heartfelt speech to her with the chilling phrase "He went on for some time" - a typically Kraussian arrow fired swift and true. The writer loves the desk - its "nineteen drawers of varying size whose mundane occupations (stamps here, paper clips there) hid a far more complex design, the blueprint of the mind formed over tens of thousands of days of thinking while staring at them."

For another character, the desk is "like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many terrible little drawers". A young student makes love on the desk; a mysterious furniture dealer reclaims the desk for its rightful owner. Krauss makes each narrator's voice so persuasive and distinct that despite this (literally) wooden conceit the book maintains momentum - just.

Its purposes are higher than its narrative pull is strong. Krauss's tutor at Stanford was Joseph Brodsky and Great House affirms, as he did, how literature can - must - restore the robberies perpetrated by pogroms and displacement.

The title comes from the Book of Kings ("and he burned every great house ") and references the idea that, if places and property are destroyed, identity lives on in other spaces: in the Talmud, in writings, in the mind. "What is a Jew without Jerusalem? Only later, after ben Zakkai died, did his answer slowly reveal itself, the way an enormous mural only begins to make sense as you walk backwards away. Turn Jerusalem into an idea.

Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself."
Here, the humble writing desk "always poised to offer up its back" is ennobled into a multivalent symbol. There is the unmistakeable feel that the writer is following her heart here, as it leads her deeper into literature. Keeping up is sometimes a little tiring.

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