A Chilean poet gives a young woman a writing desk full of drawers and cabinets and secret compartments and then disappears under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Later, another woman requests that the desk be returned, and so begins a grand and sorrowful story of the writers who share the desk as it moves from one recipient to another.
Each desk owner experiences an intricate world of love and loss to which the title of this book – Great House – likely refers, and to which the desk is a magnificent metaphor. Author Nicole Krauss is particularly insightful about how the beguiling pull of desire for both people and ideas reveals only a slight difference between the two. Isn’t it often our ideas of others, she asks us to wonder, that we really want – and which can so easily lead toward our undoing?
Readers who enjoy rich characterization will love this author. If you like reading John Banville or Richard Powers, you will also like Nicole Krauss.