2010 book 247

Nicole Krauss' Great House
Krauss' History of Love is one of those amazing books that's hard to follow up, which maybe is why it took like five years for this one to come out. But this one manages to build on that a bit. It's the story of a desk, or really the stories of the people who are connected by a desk. Things start with a writer in New York who was given the desk by a Chilean poet who was later tortured and killed; twenty-some years later, his daughter comes to reclaim it. And then the other stories start to come in, bouncing from New York to England to Israel. I think I was most affected by the elderly man whose author wife (a different author than the first one) has just died, leaving behind a secret. I was less enamored of the Israeli man narrating his emotional distress to his estranged son after his own wife's death (some of these narrators were a bit too rambly for me, and this was the worst of those). And there are others as well, all tying together the themes of love and loss and memory. I'm not sure I loved this book as much as History of Love, but it's a big achievement from a literary perspective, and justifiably nominated for the National Book Award. A/A-.