This book is not about a house, great or minute. It’s about a(view spoiler)[desk. (hide spoiler)]

Okay, so maybe metaphorically speaking it could be about a great house, like as if we all live in the ‘great house’ of life blah blah blah but, really, it’s about a(view spoiler)[desk. (hide spoiler)]

I’m not complaining. I really really like the (view spoiler)[desk. (hide spoiler)] (aside: you can actually click on those... It's not a real spoiler, I just wanted to test that feature out.) It sounds like it could hold a house with all its drawers and it’s magnitude and daunting history. “To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures dome homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner too make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility….This desk was something else entirely; an enormous, forboding 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.”

I am sure that I am not worthy of this desk. Desks like these are for Significant People. I am comfortable in knowing I am not one of them. Except to my six year old, who has yet to learn.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel at the end of this book. It’s sort of… aloof. It has a presence and it’s not one to embrace you and absorb you within its pages being so unkind as to make you ignore your family, friends, traffic lights. No, it’s dignified. It stands there and says ‘OK, I’m here and I will tell you a story but you need to follow along, I’m not going to hold your hand, I’m not going to wait for you—don’t try to hug me. Personal space, buddy.’ It’s been awhile since I’ve read something like this and at first the psychoneurotic in me pushed it away. I didn’t feel the demand and it made me stand offish.

I’m not sure where the switch happened. Where I couldn’t put the book down even though it still had me at arms length. Was it at "I tapped a giant bruise on my knee that I couldn’t remember getting. I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.” or was it “… silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to coexist in a family.” I think I just sort of erected a shanty around it. Each section is really its own story and the one thread is the desk. Krauss takes her time connecting them, instead introducing you to new characters or revisiting characters from early on. It can be infuriating if you’re looking for flow but I’m not, so all’s well. I have not read The History of Love yet; I’ve started it and it kind of bored me so…. but I’m sure it was my fault, not the books (it’s never the book’s fault.) so I wasn’t familiar with her writing style. I have to say that it made me feel brainy. You know how some books make you sad or mad or bored or angry? This made me feel mature. Each section reads (to me) like a telling. The character is in a confessional and what you read is raw, exposing, looking for absolution. It made me guffaw to come across her quoting Camus ‘The act of love is always a confession.’ See? Me=Smart.

But, what can I really say about this book? I liked it. You may not. I tend to like female writers, not really sure why, but I do. I enjoyed watching the history of the desk, of what it meant to each character or how it affected others. There were lines that made me sigh: "There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.”
This will stick with me. I will compare near future books with this one. It won’t wear off so soon.

There were two quotes where different characters refer to books that I read more than once then jotted down in my notebook:

“The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life—a pot, a chair, a lamp--- threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn’t like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.”

You’re preaching to the choir, Nicole.

“I spent the morning reading Ovid. I read differently know, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time.”

What a sad thought, especially when I can’t remember a lot of the books that I love, but I guess that’s something I have to let go of, for now.