Great House

A Novel

By: Nicole Krauss

Narrated by: Alma Cuervo, George Guidall, Celeste Ciulla, Paul Hecht, Robert Ian Mackenzie

Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

From the internationally best-selling author of The History of Love comes this stunning novel. Great House follows the multiple owners of one writing desk and how the desk shapes their lives. A young novelist inherited the desk from a poet taken by Pinochet’s police. Then the desk is stolen from her by the poet’s supposed daughter. In its drawers, another man discovers a long-kept secret about his wife. And a Jerusalem antiques dealer uses the desk in his family’s study, which was devastated by the Nazis in 1944.

©2010 Nicole Krauss (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent.... The sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow. ( Publishers Weekly)

“The most heartbreaking part of Great House, the third novel by Nicole Krauss, is having to finish it…As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you’ll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive.” (Rachel Rosenblit, Elle)

“Krauss’ masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling.... This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author’s first two books and bring her legions more.” ( Booklist, Starred Review)

i love this author

i like this author and her husbands work.. although this book, i dont know maybe im not smart enough, but it was tough to follow.. but i did stick it out.. it was somewhat sad.. i think i remember it ending on a dime.

Empty

Would you try another book from Nicole Krauss and/or the narrators?

Stimulated alot of discussion at book club, we all hated it. Spoiler.... We determined that the contents of the locked drawer was a metaphor for the whole book...empty

Has Great House turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes. Literary fiction. No plot, no dialog, no read

Any additional comments?

Wasn't that enough?

not my favorite

Hard to follow. Too much jumping back and forth. I tried really hard. at least I finished it

Disjointed, Disconnected, Dry

I thought the book sounded very interesting when I started, but the further I got into it, the more I wondered what it was about. A series of different vignettes all revolving around a desk that really has nothing substantial to do with the meat of the plots. I guess Krauss was trying to come up with a connection between these stories and used a desk to do it. This book did not work for me at all. I felt no connection to any of the characters. Not one was likeable. I did not enjoy the style of writing either, and it was difficult to know which story she was talking about because names were rare throughout the book. Complicated can be good, but in the end you hope for closure or at the very least some sort of connection. I got neither. This was my first and last Krauss book. I read in another review someone said “the thrust is very cerebral, rather than visceral”, as obscure as this statement may be, it does summarize the book rather nicely.
The narration was the only thing that kept me going.

Not such a "great house"

After hearing an interesting, not quite positive, review on NPR, I decided to give this book a try. What a waste of time and money. The story was disjointed and there were no characters I could be interested in. It was overly wordy and even after listening several times to the same section, I was still confused. What was the whole thing about the great white shark? Save your credits or money. I must admit the narration was excellent but still didn't make any of the characters interesting. I hope the story came together at the end,but I didn't get that far.

Don't bother

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The synopsis of this story isn't accurate. The stories are supposed to revolve around a desk that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. The first story did but I listened for several chapters on the next one and nowhere was there a mention of the desk. The same goes for the next story. I stopped listening to the second and third stories because they made no sense and weren't interesting. I couldn't bring myself to listen to anymore. The writer should have made the connetion to the desk at the beginning of each story after the first.

What do you think your next listen will be?

The Hunger Games

What about the narrators???s performance did you like?

The three narrator's I listened too did a great job with their characters.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment

Any additional comments?

I'm still shaking my head after listening to most of the second story. It nonsensible.

Disappointing

I loved Nicole Krauss’s History of Love, and had a good feeling about this book’s tale of a desk that comes into and goes out of the lives of many people. As a writer, I enjoyed what she had to say about writing, and she nailed her description of a marriage going wrong. But I became less and less engaged with the story for two reasons. One, as others have noted, the story is confusing, and as it goes on, there is less inclusion of the desk as a linking factor. Two, and the reason I finally gave up halfway through, the female narrators were so off-putting, even the beautifully-written love/sex scenes came off as clinical notes for a textbook. Another reviewer put it perfectly when she said these narrators sound like NPR hosts. Yes! I could not bear to listen to them. (George Guidall, who was such an important reader of History of Love, is just as wonderful here, but he read only a section.) I depend upon audiobooks because reading triggers my chronic migraines. I am going to make note of these narrators’ names so I can be more discerning with my future choices.