Great House by Nicole Krauss
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book is very similar to Krauss' first book, "The History of Love"; perspectives from young and old, both sexes, the Jewish world in the center and love, old and young, interspersed throughout decades.
This one's like Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex", but not as focused, and definitely not as good, despite it being fair.
Her tellings from an old man's perspective are crystal-clear. The muddiness is applied when she tells of the now, of the why's and lets me down in term of keeping the story fresh and the reader keen. At times I just wanted to press "next" and go forth to The Exciting.
And there were a few exciting, fresh moments, but not that many. Maybe it's me being jaded, having just read Palahniuk's "Rant", but I don't suspect it. Time will tell.
All in all: entertaining, a few choice paragraphs and insights, but for the most part a flower that has somewhat wilted. All it needed was fertile ground, dang it.
Here follow a bunch of my favourite quotes from the book, so a spoiler alert is hereby issued:
Many years have passed since then. I was married for a while, but now I live alone again, though not unhappily. There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.
You know, that painting has a sad story, he added a moment later, almost as an afterthought. One afternoon, the mother gave the children sleeping pills in their tea. The boy was nine and his sister was eleven. Once they were asleep, she carried them to the car and drove out to the forest. By this time it was getting dark. She poured gasoline all over the car and lit a match. All three burned to death.
And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thought“”One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon.
At the door we shook hands, a gesture that always struck me as strangely out of place, as if, with all one's organs spread on the table and the allotted time in the operating room almost up, the surgeon were to wrap them each neatly in plastic wrap before putting them back and hurriedly sewing you up again.
(I have a sense that even in this weakened, alert state, the man-child is deaf to all words except those that come to him through the enormous, furry portals of the earphones)
Once I overheard my father yelling at my mother that every time she flushed the toilet it was a dollar down the drain. After that, I acquired the habit of letting waste collect in the bowl over the course of the day until it reached a critical mass. When my mother's threats prevented this, I trained myself to hold it for as long as possible. If I had an accident, I bore my humiliation and my mother's anger with thoughts of the money I'd saved my parents. All the same, I could never quite work out the incongruity between the wide, murky East River that ran endlessly outside our window and the preciousness of the water in the toilet.
A shark that is a repository for human sadness. Who takes all that the dreamers cannot bear, who bears the violence of their accumulated feeling. How often I thought about that beast and the chance I lost with you. At times I felt I was on the verge of understanding everything the great fish stood for.
When you came home at last you were neither the soldier I had watched disappear into the crowd, nor the boy I knew. You were a kind of shell, emptied out of both of those people. You sat mute in a chair in the corner of the living room, a cup of tea untouched on the side table, and winced when I went to touch you.
The act of love is always a confession, Camus wrote.
ONE EVENING the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone. There is no longer anyone or anything to expect. I put down my book, carefully marking the page with a bookmark. Lotte had always put her books down open-faced and when we first met I used to tell her that I could hear the little high-pitched cry as its spine was broken. It was a joke, but later when she left the room or went to sleep I would pick up her book and slip a bookmark in, until one day she lifted her book, ripped the bookmark out, and dropped it on the floor. Don't ever do that again, she said. And I understood that there was one more place that belonged to her that I would be now and forever barred from. From then on I no longer asked about her reading. I waited until she volunteered something“”a sentence that moved her, a bright passage, a character vividly drawn. Sometimes it came and sometimes it didn't. But it was not for me to ask.