Hearts Full of SorrowBy Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
GREAT HOUSE
By Nicole Krauss
289 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95
Admirers of Nicole Krauss’s novel “The History of Love” (and they are many, and I am one) will want to know the answer to this question: How much does her new novel, “Great House,” resemble its predecessor? The good news is: very much indeed. And the good news is also: not so very much.
In themes and preoccupations, “Great House” and “The History of Love” overlap. Both explore shattered characters, with pasts blasted by the sort of loss that makes even the pretense of normal life impossible. (By “normal life” let us mean one in which certain premises can be assumed — for example, that it is possible to put one foot in front of the other, on the way to meet a lover or to buy a loaf of rye bread, without being overtaken by tremors issuing from convulsions of the moral order.) The narrative structures of both books mirror the characters’ own shattering and require readers to reassemble the full story for themselves. And both books coalesce around artifacts from the past. In the case of “The History of Love,” it is a book; in the case of “Great House,” it is a writing desk. Given the nature of these organizing objects, it is no surprise that both novels designate literature as singularly significant. Writing — at least when it is great — is a kind of consecration, placing its practitioners in the way of assaults from large truths and perils. This last theme runs the risk of morbid solemnity; everything rests on the execution.
So what, then, is so different about the two novels? It is their tone. “The History of Love,” despite its tragic underpinnings, is anything but solemn. Its sorrow is rambunctious, its anguish rollicking. Its fulgurating pain comes out in shrieks of unlikely laughter. This extraordinary feat of immaculate blending is accomplished by main characters who are, despite all (and all is truly terrible here), stuffed with unconscionable amounts of charm. In particular, there is Leopold Gursky, who is, to my mind, one of the great characters of recent fiction, as hilarious as he is tragic, an exquisite amalgam of great artist and great clown — think of Beckett, with a Polish-Yiddish accent. Gursky does not choose to be excluded from normal life, but rather strives, with quirky futility, to achieve the ordinary. This is the derivation of so much of the exuberance in what is an essentially tragic novel.
The characters of “Great House” lack all trace of exuberance. Normal life does not beckon them. They inhabit their sorrow with a lover’s ardor, cultivating it into an art form. There is a forbidding, and seductive, remoteness about them that captures those who draw too close and then can get no closer. There are four strands to the novel, and the tasks of narration fall to those who have been caught by these dangerously removed enchanters. (In one case, the enchanter is not human, but the art of writing itself.) These narrators are marooned in a terrible place, unable to return to the safe shore of normal life, unable to follow their enchanters into the deeps where only they can breathe. Their enchanters are themselves enchanted with their own sorrows. They have been shaped around what it is they have lost, a central idea in “Great House” — in fact, the meaning behind its title.
The novel opens with a writer named Nadia telling her story to someone she addresses as “Your honor,” whose identity we will learn when we ought to. She is explaining herself, and her explanation is focused on her relationship with the desk that, decades ago, she came to half-possess. Abandoned by her boyfriend, who left with the furniture, Nadia learned of the desk from a friend of a young Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky, who was leaving New York to go back to Chile, at least temporarily, and needed a place to park his furniture. The desk she got from him is a huge affair, best described by another narrator, whose wife passed it on to Varsky in the first place. “This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus’ flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers.” There are, to be exact, 19 drawers, one of them permanently locked. The desk stayed with Nadia in New York for decades, never reclaimed because Varsky had become one of Pinochet’s disappeared. Then one day a young girl, claiming to be both Varsky’s daughter and from Jerusalem, called Nadia and asked for the desk, which Nadia relinquished, a more wrenching parting than any human had ever presented her.
The narration is then taken up by a father, who lives in Israel and whose connection to the story we must wait to discover. He is addressing his son, Dov, one of the suffering remote who are such a torment to love. Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature’s elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. “Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?” This father, both ruthless and heartbroken, is a bundle of contradictions vibrating with a boisterous grief reminiscent of Gursky’s.
The next strand belongs to a cultivated British husband, Arthur Bender, whose wife, Lotte Berg, was the one who gave Varsky the desk. She had come to London from Germany as the chaperone on a Kindertransport, leaving her parents to be murdered in the camps. She, too, is a writer, a locked drawer and a torment to love. Her husband begins to guess at the loss around which she is formed only at the end of their long life together. And then the narration passes to a young American woman who has come to Oxford to study literature before falling in love with the male half of a mysterious sibling pair, Yoav and Leah Weisz, who are themselves held captive by their father, George Weisz, a famous antiques dealer, originally from Hungary, whose genius lies in being able to locate pieces plundered by the Nazis, objects remembered with infinite longing by the original owners and their children.
What gives the quickening of life to this elegiac novel and takes the place of the unlikely laughter of “The History of Love”? The feat is achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. So, for example, here is George Weisz describing how, when his clients speak of their lives before the war, “between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. . . . I see his mother’s legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper’s broom missed.” Those crumbs are an artist’s true touch. They demonstrate how Krauss is able, despite the formidable remove of the central characters and the mournfulness of their telling, to ground “Great House” in the shock of immediacy.
Krauss has taken great risks in dispensing with the whimsy and humor that she summoned for her tragic vision in “The History of Love.” Here she gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of “36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/books/review/Goldstein-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1&pagewanted=print
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