Review
I have been a fan of Nicole Krauss for a while, and so I jumped at the opportunity to review
Great House. This novel possesses the same inventive, graceful prose that Krauss is known for. How wonderful is her prose? Even though I had previously bought and listened to
The History of Love on audio I went out and bought the actual book so I could hold it in my hands and periodically savor the parts that simply left me in awe.
On first glance
Great House runs along a similar theme as
The History of Love. The theme has to do with the interconnectedness of people the world over and how, over time, we can trace a connection between ourselves and just about every other person living or dead. The publisher plays up this theme in the book's jacket blurb, suggesting a kind of game out of trying to connect all the seemingly unrelated characters to an...
Beyond the Book
Although Nicole Krauss's three books to date would not be classified as magical realism (a style, according to Wikipedia, wherein, "normal occurrences… are presented in a straightforward manner, which allows the 'real' and the 'fantastic' to be accepted in the same stream of thought") there is in her books an element of the magic that exists in everyday life. These occurrences are no less magical for being easily written off as coincidence, or ascribed to déjà vu or the smallness of the planet.
For example, in
The History of Love (2005), Krauss's second novel after
Man Walks Into a Room (2002), Leo Gursky, a young Polish man fell in love with a beautiful woman named Alma in the late 1930s. He was so enraptured by her that he wrote a book called...
