Great House
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Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction: A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession,of the lives it passes through.The Barnes & Noble ReviewKrauss excels at incubating moments of human understanding -- epiphanies, if you will, though that word can suggest a cheap or easy realization, and Krauss's epiphanies feel organic and earned -- that resonate with readers as much as they do with her own fictional creations. Take the devastating moment when Arthur suddenly sees that his late wife's survival, of the Holocaust and then the life she made afterward, necessarily limited her capacity to love him. "Her self-sufficiency -- the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it -- made it impossible for her ever to need me as I needed her." Krauss's remarkable achievement with Great House is to atomize the essential isolation that is part of the human condition and reflect it back to us in a way that makes us feel a little less alone.
IAll Rise 3True Kindness 47Swimming Holes 75Lies Told by Children 109IITrue Kindness 171All Rise 199Swimming Holes 239Weisz 283
