The central character in Great House, Nicole Krauss's new novel, is an antique writing desk, which the book's various narrators describe as 'tremendous', 'hulking', a 'grotesque, threatening monster' and 'a Trojan horse', among other menacing epithets. 'To call it a desk is to say too little,' one of them explains. 'The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of ... This desk was something else entirely.' Krauss tracks her unlikely protagonist through a series of longish chapters that alternate between the first-person perspectives of five narrators and dip in and out of a wide variety of locations and periods: from late 20th-century New York, through Budapest in the 1940s and mid to late 20th-century London, to Pinochet's Chile and present-day Jerusalem.

LRB 28 April 2011 | PDF Download