Nicole Krauss’ novel Great House was published in 2010. Synopsis: 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.

Great House tells the story of a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. It’s a meditation on memory and loss.

The reading was recorded at the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2012.

Edited by: Honey Biba Beckerlee
Produced by: Christian Lund.
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2012

Supported by Nordea-fonden