6/19/2023 0 Comments Great house by nicole krauss![]() As her narrators directly address their thoughts and confessions towards specific, cognitively or physically absent characters, Krauss reveals new depths of each speaker’s consciousness. The most effective aspect of Krauss’s “Great House” is the unusual structure of her first person narrative, which shifts between the perspectives of her five protagonists. Rather, her strength as a writer emerges as she focuses on the overwhelming onslaught of thoughts which plague each mourner. But despite the interior focus of the work, Krauss manages to avoid writing a novel whose sole preoccupation is the abstract and inevitably cliché emotions of her grieving characters. Weisz and his four fellow speakers narrate their ways through the challenges posed by grief, in an attempt to reconcile the absences caused by their respective losses. Though many years later, half a century after he died, I stood… and thought, Useful for what?” The speaker is Weisz, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who specializes in retrieving antique furniture for mourners who wish to reconstruct memories of their dead loved ones. In Nicole Krauss’s third novel, “Great House,” one of her characters muses, “y father, a scholar of history, taught me that the absence of things is more useful than their presence. ![]()
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