Drawers of other summers

I have now finished Great House by Nicole Krauss. The novels is in two parts, each dealing with four narrative strands one at a time. They are connected by a huge desk, which has many drawers of various sizes, and by a young Chilean poet, who possessed the desk for an amount of time. The poet had been kidnapped during the Pinochet revolution in Chile and killed. The hole left in the lives of several of the novel's protagonists by this character reminded me a bit of Archimboldi, but this is a novel, which although peopled by characters many of whom are writers, is about people, rather than literature. Or perhaps it would be more clear to say it is about the effect the creative process has on those characters, but has very little to say about the writing that they produce. I was reminded more of Small Island by Andrea Levy, both because of the way several interconnected narrative strands run concurrently, and because one strand of each novel shares a similarity. This book is not treated favourably by the comparison. The structured coincidences which tie the story together seen too forced: they lack either the natural realism of Small Island or the easy serendipity of Krauss' acclaimed first novel The History of Love. This is by no stretch a bad novel; of the four narratives one in particular is sharply realised and affecting. The problem is simply that it wears the nuts and bolts of its architecture like Paris' Pompidou Centre, which made the writers presence that bit too intrusive.