2010 National Book Award Finalist,
Fiction
Nicole Krauss
Great House
W.W. Norton & Co.
Photo credit: Joyce Ravid
ABOUT THE BOOK
For twenty-five years, a reclusive
American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited
from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands
of Pinochet's secret police-that is, until a girl claiming
to be the poet's
daughter comes to claim it. Across the ocean, in the
leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying
wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that
unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques
dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered
by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories
is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those
who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators
of Great House make their confessions, the
desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally
to stand for all that has been taken from them, and
all that binds them to what has disappeared.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicole Krauss
is the author of the highly acclaimed novel Man
Walks Into a Room and the international bestseller
The History of Love, which was published by
W.W. Norton in 2005. It won the William Saroyan International
Prize for Writing and France’s Prix du Meilleur
Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the
Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her fiction
has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s,
Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories,
and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five
languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
SUGGESTED LINKS
Nicole Krauss' website
http://nicolekrauss.com/
Video - Nicole
Krauss on Sundance Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NconupPRAEc
Nicole Krauss' Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Krauss
EXCERPT
GREAT HOUSE
Here. Let me begin. You see, my child, a little bit every day I find myself contemplating my death. Investigating it. Dipping my toe, as it were. Not practicing so much as interrogating its conditions while I still possess powers of interrogation, and can still fathom oblivion. In one of these little excursions into the unknown I uncovered something about you that I’d almost forgotten. For the first three years of your life you knew nothing of death. You thought that it would all go on without end. On the first night you left your crib behind to sleep in a bed, I came to say good night to you. Now I’m going to sleep in a big-boy bed forever? you asked. Yes, I said, and we sat together, I imagining you on a flight through the halls of eternity clutching your blankie, you imagining whatever a child imagines when he tries to conceive of forever. A few days later you were sitting at the table playing with the food that you refused to eat. So don’t eat, I said. But if you don’t eat, you can’t leave the table. It’s as simple as that. Your lip began to tremble. Go ahead and sleep there for all I care, I said. This isn’t how Mama does it, you whined. I don’t care how she does it, I spat, this is how I do it, and you’re not moving until you eat! You burst into tears, protesting and carrying on. I ignored you. After a while silence filled the room, punctuated only by your little whimpers. Then, out of nowhere, you announced, When Yoella dies, we’ll get a dog. I was surprised. Because of the bluntness of the statement, and because I had no idea you knew anything of death. Won’t you be sad when she dies? I asked, forgetting for a moment the war of the food. And you, very practically, replied, Yes, because then we won’t have a cat to pet. A moment passed. What does it look like when people die? you asked. As if they’re asleep, I said, only they don’t breathe. You thought about this. Do children die? you asked. I felt a pain open in my chest. Sometimes, I said. Perhaps I should have chosen other words. Never, or simply, No. But I didn’t lie to you. At least you can say that of me. Then, turning your little face to me, without flinching, you asked, Will I die? And as you said the words horror filled me as it had never before, tears burned my eyes, and instead of saying what I should have said, Not for a long, long time, or Not you my child, you alone will live forever, I said, simply, Yes. And because, no matter how you suffered, deep inside you were still an animal like any other who wants to live, feel the sun, and be free, you said, But I don’t want to die. The terrible injustice of it filled you. And you looked at me as if I were responsible.