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Hello and welcome to the Double X Audio Book Club for Thursday, December 2nd. I'm Hannah Rosen.

I'm the co-editor of Double X and I'm here with my fellow co-editor, Emily Bazelon. Hi, Emily.

Hello. And with Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker. Hi, Margaret.

Hi there. Today we're going to talk about Great House. This is the third novel of Nicole Krause. Her second novel, which many of you may have read, is called The History of Love. Great House is a novel which centers around several relationships of father and a son and a couple of married couples, and they are all basically loosely connected by this very heavy desk from the Nazi war era. Now, you know,

we all have sentimental attachment to objects, objects that are important to us for various reasons,

but I would say that this desk goes beyond sentimental attachment. And do either of you want to explain a little bit what the role of the desk is? I'll start by just saying that it initially belonged to a man. Well, we think the way the novel set up, that it belonged to a man named Daniel Varski, who's a Chilean poet. And Emily, you seem to have opened your book. I have. I'm not explaining anything in general in this podcast because I found this book mystifying and bewildering. But I will say that the desk.

People plug in. The desk has this really amazing imagery. So this desk, I don't actually think the desk, anyone's attached to the desk. It's more like a monster in the book. And Krauss writes toward the end of the novel that the desk was an

enormous foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be

inanimate, but like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many

little terrible drawers. And this image goes on that ends, once I dreamed that I opened one of the drawers to find that it held a festering mummy.

That's one of the darker passages about the desk.

And there's some lighter ones?

You'll need to point them out to me.

Not exactly light, but lighter, perhaps.

But yes, it is presented as this kind of hulking presence. I mean, it's a literal desk. It's a desk that belongs. It exists. People work on it. People work on it. Two of the novel is told by four different narrators. Two of those narrators are writers, our female writers, both of whom work at the desk.

And for them, it symbolizes, I think, slightly different things.

Actually, one of the writers who is a German Jewish refugee who's lost her family in the Holocaust is married to a British academic.

And she works at this desk, and he's the narrator of the section about her and their marriage. And I think for her in that section, say his name just so we know. Arthur, yes. And her name is her husband. Like my husband, as a matter of fact. And her name is Lottie. And her name is Lottie. And I think the desk in that section sort of symbolizes the secrets and the parts of his wife's past and current life that are inaccessible to him. He is a

sort of he tends her. She's a great artist. He takes care of all the sort of practical matters of

daily life. She has a secret which is eventually revealed. He doesn't really go into her study

or seldom does, is intimidated by the desk.

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