Great House

From the book cover

For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away.
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This novel is divided into two parts, with four very long chapters breaking up each part. Because the chapters are so long and a new narrator is introduced in each chapter, during the first part, there is a feeling of reading a series of short stories with only the desk connecting most of them. I say most of them because the desk isn't mentioned in the chapters titled "True Kindness."

In these chapters the narrator is an old man who has just buried his wife and his now dying himself. The chapters are written as a conversation between himself and his youngest son, whom he's always been somewhat estranged from. This son was at one time an aspiring writer, that seems to be the only connection with the ongoing theme of writing. I don't quite understand why these chapters are included in the novel.

All of the main characters and narrators of the chapters are very intriguing; each chapter could easily be developed into a standalone novel.

I really enjoyed the tone of this novel, but I can't help feeling that I've missed a lot of meaning behind the stories and thus will probably have to read it a second or third time in order to fully understand all of the strands. After my first read, I'd say Great House is as much about the great desk as it is about memory.

4/5