Great House

Told by five separate first-person narrators, American author Nicole Krauss’s novel Great House (2010) weaves many characters’ histories into the story of an antique desk, which as it changes hands becomes a symbol of loss and dislocation. Krauss’s third novel, rapturously received by critics, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction.

The first of the novel’s five narrators is Nadia. A writer of romans-à-clef based in New York, her best work is behind her, and she has never managed to achieve lasting or satisfying relationships with the people in her life. All her writing is done at a huge desk—with many drawers, one locked—which Nadia inherited by accident from Daniel Varsky, a Chilean poet who was tortured to death by the Pinochet regime before he could return to New York to claim it. That was in 1972, and Nadia has pined ever since for Varsky, whom she loved passionately but who was never her lover.

Now, in 2010, a young woman arrives at Nadia’s house, claiming to be Varsky’s daughter and demanding that Nadia hand over the “enormous foreboding” desk. Nadia complies, and from that moment is abandoned to her haunted decline as a writer and an emotional being.



Nadia travels to Israel, trying to find the girl—whom she now suspects of lying about her paternity—and retrieve the desk. There, increasingly desperate, Nadia steals a car and accidentally drives it into a young judge, Dov. Her story is narrated to Dov in his hospital bed.

The novel’s second narrator is Dov’s father, Aaron, a physically decrepit but mentally vigorous Israeli lawyer. Aaron addresses Dov directly, relating the story of their reunion. Dov has returned to Israel after many years away to attend his mother’s funeral. Since then, father and son have been living together, but they have not talked much, and they have not achieved the reconciliation Aaron had hoped for. Dov has taken to long, nighttime walks. Tonight, he has been gone longer than usual, and Aaron is worried. As he talks, he is sitting alone at the kitchen table, waiting for his son to come home.

Arthur Bender, an Oxford don who specializes in romantic poetry, narrates the story of his wife, Lotte Berg. Lotte arrived in England on the Kindertransport, which brought children out of Nazi Germany, with 86 other children. There she became an author of disturbing and symbolic short fictions, and she met and married Arthur. Although he loved Lotte deeply, Arthur struggled to understand her. An artist in love with her “instincts and vision,” she had many secrets from her husband. One evening, she had an unexpected visit from the Chilean poet Daniel Varsky, an admirer of her work. The two became close—Arthur wonders how close—and Lotte gifted Varsky the enormous writing desk she had owned for as long as Arthur had known her. Not until Lotte contracted Alzheimer’s disease did Arthur learn she had given a baby up for adoption before they met. Arthur struggled to assimilate this information. After Lotte’s death, Arthur tracked down the woman who had adopted Lotte’s son, only to learn that he died aged 23.



The fourth of the novel’s narrators, American Isabel, recounts her love affair with Yoav Weisz, a fellow student at Oxford. Yoav is unusually close to his sister, Leah, and as Isabel gets to know the family better, she begins to think of their relationship as platonically incestuous. The siblings are dominated by the figure of their father, George Weisz, who has made his life’s work the recovery of valuable items—furniture and artwork—stolen by the Nazis from their Jewish victims. Weisz believes that the objects of lost childhoods can be restorative, even redemptive, for the survivors who lost family in the death camps. He searches the world for these treasures, unrelenting in his pursuit of them.

Isabel learns that her mother is sick and returns to the United States for six months. When she comes back to Oxford, she finds Yoav’s house empty. Six years later, she receives a letter from Leah, in which she explains that their father killed himself during Isabel’s absence. Wracked with grief and guilt, Leah and Yoav became mutually dependent hermits. Leah begs Isabel to come to care for Yoav so that she can leave him.

The novel’s final narrator is George Weisz. We learn that the antique desk that has belonged to Nadia and Varsky and Lotte first belonged to Weisz’s father. It is prominent in Weisz’s memory of his father’s study in pre-War Budapest. His father was arrested by the Gestapo and killed, and in the years since the War, Weisz has devoted himself to reassembling his father’s furniture in his own study in Israel. All that is missing is the desk. He sends his daughter to New York to take it from its current owner, but instead of bringing it back to Israel, Leah places it in storage in New York, hiding it from her father. Weisz manages to track it down anyway. He bribes the owner to let him see the desk. He sits down at the desk he has hunted for so many years, and instead of the feeling of restitution he had hoped for, he feels only his loss.