January 28, 2011

Books

Desk Set

Great HouseNicole KraussW. W. Norton, $24.95, 289 pp.

Valerie Sayers

“Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.” Thus a contemporary antiques dealer named Weisz, a crucial but shadowy figure in Nicole Krauss’s new novel Great House, explains the first-century rabbi Yochanan b (...)


 

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