Nicole Krauss on Fame, Loss, and Writing About Holocaust Survivors

A few years ago, after her novel The History of Love became an international bestseller, Nicole Krauss reflected on her unexpected fame: “Something about the feeling of writing seemed to change for me once the book was published. I felt, a bit, as if I’d lost something hard to put my finger on, something personal and natural that I'd loved about writing.”

Today, Krauss is more accustomed to sharing her inner world with the public. Her newest book, Great House, has been nominated for a National Book Award, and early reviews have been packed with praise. “It is a high-wire performance,” wrote fellow author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in a glowing New York Times book review earlier this week, “only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.”

Though the novel itself is currently in the spotlight, its characters are intensely private people. Many of them, like Krauss herself, are writers. And in the course of the novel, many of them end up sitting at the same enormous desk. When we first encounter this piece of furniture, it belongs to a Chilean revolutionary poet. Later, we see it in the lonely apartment of a divorced New York writer and in the London attic of an elderly German-Jewish refugee.

For most of the novel, it’s unclear what the desk represents or whether the book's far-flung characters will ever meet. But Krauss has a unique way of assembling novels—baroque, complex, and with a stunning tidiness that isn’t clear until the very last page. All the parts do fit together in the end.