Original Comments (Pre-Review):I would like to review this novel more formally in the near future, but to do so I'll have to flick through it and refresh my memory.My reaction at the time was that it was one of the best novels I had ever read.Nicole Krauss understands people and love and feelings and she writes about them in a word perfect way.As a reader, I am prepared to go wherever she wants to take me. I will trust her judgement.I have recently watched a few of her videos and interviews on Youtube and she's also someone who I enjoy listening to when she speaks about her craft and her choice of subject matter.This probably sounds very gushy and naive, but I promise to write something more considered.Review (September 26, 2011):Warning about SpoilersI have tried to minimise and identify plot spoilers.However, this is an emotional response to the novel, and might reveal significance that you might want to enjoy by way of your own detection.I hope that my review doesn't spoil anything for you, or if it does, that you quickly forget it.Lives Lived and Measured by the Deli CounterNicole Krauss’ “The History of Love” is one of my favourite novels of all time.I read it once pre-Good Reads, and have just re-read it, so that I could review it. And I will read it again. Often.That doesn’t count the numerous times I have fingered through the book seeking out passages and expressions and meanings and significances that stimulated or appealed to me.It’s an exquisitely crafted tale of love, loss, longing, hope, defiance, resilience and, it has to be said, delusion.I love its Jewish wisdom and concern with the family, I love its Yiddish rhythms and expressions and humour and playfulness, I love the window it offers into the millennia of Jewish culture and enrichment of the world.When I open the pages of this book, I feel like I am walking into the best delicatessen or pastry shop in the world.Everything is there on display, everything is on offer (we can eat in or take away!).It’s all been made with consummate skill and affection, it’s designed to satiate our appetite, to enrich our lives.I look at it all, knowing it will feed us, it will sustain us, it will revive our energy. It’s food for thought, it’s food for life.I'm sure it will help us live our own lives and tell our own tales, it will equip each of us to tell our own History of Love.I am wearing my Second Avenue Deli t-shirt as I think and type this.Legend“The History of Love” is written from four different perspectives, each of which is represented by a different symbol at the beginning of the chapter:Leo Gursky = a heartAlma Singer = a compassOmniscient Narrator = an open bookBird (Alma’s brother) = an arkOnce Upon a TimeOnce upon a time, there was a Polish boy named Leo Gursky who loved a girl across the field named Alma Mereminski.“Her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering”.He asked her to marry him when they were both still only ten.“He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. "What if I die? She asked. Even then, he said.”He carved “A+L” in the bark of a tree and had someone take a photo of the two of them in front of that tree. He writes three books for her, all in their native Yiddish, the last being “The History of Love”.Book 1: this one was about Slonim (Alma says, “she liked it better when I made things up”)Book 2: he made up everything for this one (Alma says, “maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything”)Book 3: “The History of Love” (Leo says,"I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only things I knew.”)In July, 1941, that boy, who was now a man of 21, avoided murder by the German Einsatzgruppen, because he was lying on his back in the woods thinking about the girl.“You could say it was his love for her that saved his life.”Alma’s father had already saved her by sending her to America.Unbeknown to either of them, Alma was pregnant with their son, Isaac, when she left.Oblivious to the birth of his son, Leo lives in hiding surrounded by Nazi atrocities.Letters back and forth fail to reach their destination.He even writes his own obituary, when he is in the depths of illness and despair.By the time Leo finally escapes to New York himself, five years later, he has become an invisible man in the face of death.He traces Alma, only to learn that she has had their child and that, believing he was dead, she has married another man.He is ecstatic that “our sum had come to equal a child” ("A+L=I").He asks her once to “come with me”, she can’t and he does the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.He has little involvement with Alma or Isaac after that, except as an occasional remote observer.And yet. He continues to love Alma, though he now has another quest: to determine whether Isaac, who becomes a famous writer in his own right, ever knew about his father and that he wrote “The History of Love”.Once Upon Another TimelineOnce upon another time (it is the year 2000 when Leo is 80 and believes he is approaching death), a precocious 15 year old girl goes by the name Alma Singer.Her mother, Charlotte, a literary translator who specialises in Spanish literature, named her after every girl in a book Alma’s father David gave her mother called “The History of Love”.It is written in Spanish, and the "author" is Zvi Litvinoff, a friend of Leo’s who, after Leo left Poland, escaped to Chile, carrying with him the original Yiddish manuscript of “The History of Love” for safekeeping.Alma’s father died when she was seven.Like Leo, Charlotte has continued to love him (“my mother never fell out of love with my father”) and has never felt the need or desire to love another man.When Charlotte disposes of some of his possessions, Alma rescues an old sweater and decides to wear it for the rest of her life.She manages to wear it for 42 days straight.Alma is on her own quest: to know her own father better, to help her younger brother Bird to know him too, to find a lover for her mother and to learn more about her namesake in “The History of Love”.In the midst of this assortment of delicacies, Charlotte receives a letter asking her to translate “The History of Love” from Spanish to English.Family PlotI have included the above plot details, despite my normal reluctance to summarise plots in reviews.Please don’t construe any of the details as spoilers. Most of them are revealed in the first forty pages, only not necessarily in that order.And I have left out a lot of the back story, so that I could set up this context, that family is fundamental to the plot, to “The History of Love”, not to mention history itself.The Paleontological DetectiveEvery crime needs its own detective and every detective needs their own methodology, even a child detective.Nicole Krauss twice mentions the task of paleontologists.“Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist. “The only difference is that paleontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life. “Every fourteen-year-old should know something about where she comes from, my mother said. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of how it all began.”Here, the historical quest, the puzzle depends on your perspective. And there are two, the young and the old, the present and the past joining together to construct the future.For Alma, the young, the puzzle is what happened before “The History of Love” found its way into her family?For Leo, the old, it is what happened after he wrote “The History of Love”?Both have to sit down, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently, and work their own methodical way towards a solution of their own puzzle.In a way, their problem is the same: the problem of family.Leo loses a (prospective) wife and a son, Charlotte loses a husband, Alma loses a father.They have all lost the story of their family, of their love.Here, the novel is symbolic of the fate of the Jewish Family in the face of the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora.The Jewish Family has been dispersed all over the world, family members have been separated, the spine of their love and connections and cultures and books and stories has been severed.Their book has been shred into a hundred pieces and cast into the wind.Somebody has to scour the world, to find the surviving “scraps”, piece it all together again and reconstruct their history and their culture.And it will take a paleontologist. Or two.You Can Only Lose What You Once HadLeo once had Alma. He had a lover whom he loved and who loved him.He lost her, but he kept his love alive, just as he hoped that the object of his love was still alive (she actually lived until 1995).The novel is almost mythical or mythological in the way it tells this tale.Charlotte tells young Alma: “The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma.”So Leo and Alma are almost posited against Adam and Eve as the first boy and girl, the first to have mortal parents, the first children who ever fell in love with each other, the first to create a new family.Without the object of his love, he wrote about it.He kept his love alive, his love kept him alive.As he wrote in his own obituary, “He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.”And yet. His life stalled when he lost the object of his love.He ceased to live for any purpose other than the preservation of his love.His love became a fabrication that substituted for and subsumed his life.He appears to be in two minds about this:On the one hand, what more to life is there but love?“I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said….What is more than her love? I asked.”On the other hand, he recognised that he needed his invention in order to survive, that reality would have killed him.“What do I want to tell you? The truth? What is the truth? That I mistook your mother for my life? No. Isaac, I said. The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”And again, his confrontation of the truth:“The truth is that she told me that she couldn’t love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don’t know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.”And:“And now at the end of my life, I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.”Perhaps, the truth is whatever works for you.“My Friend Bruno”Leo constantly refers to his friend Bruno.I have only one head, but I am in two minds as to whether he is real or make believe.He might be a self-generated survival tool.He is modelled on Bruno Schulz, the Polish author of "The Street of Crocodiles", which is referred to a number of times in the novel.He died in 1942, and Leo even mentions that he died in 1941 in the novel.He attempts suicide in the novel, unsuccessfully, so there might be a sense in which he is a darker twin of Leo, who nevertheless manages to prolong his life (in the same way Zvi Litvinoff manages to prolong his life by confiscating and caring for Leo's obituary when he seemed like he was about to die).His role diminishes as Leo embraces reality over the course of the novel.“And Yet”And yet. “And yet.”These two words are so important to the novel.They express Leo’s defiance, his determination not to accept the hand dealt to him, his determination to avoid and evade the evil and the crime and the misfortune around him.It is his imagination, his ability to believe in something else that allows him to achieve this:“I remember the time I first realised I could make myself see something that wasn’t there…And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe…So I tried…And I found I could.”He has to imagine a better world than the one he has inherited or the one that his world has become.It was his love that enabled him to stop thinking and worrying about death, to stop worrying about the inevitability of his fate.To this extent, love is what keeps us alive, it is our heartbeat, it is the reason our heart beats (even if occasionally it causes our heart to skip a beat).Love is the defiance of death.It’s not just something we do while waiting to die, it’s something that keeps us alive.It keeps individuals alive, it keeps families alive, it keeps cultures alive and it keeps communities alive.Putting Your Legacy into WordsThe great tragedy within Leo’s life after Alma is that he believes his greatest creation, “The History of Love”, has been lost.In fact, it has been misappropriated, albeit without ill will.Again, I don’t mean this to be a spoiler. We, the readers, already know that it must exist in some form, if Alma’s family can read it and Charlotte can be asked to translate it from Spanish to English.Obviously, part of the resolution of the puzzle for Leo must be the recovery of his legacy.It is one of the things that will bond him with the family he had (but wasn’t really able to have).The other thing we find out at the beginning of the novel is that Leo has had a heart attack that has killed one quarter of his heart.This reinvigorates his fear of death and the concern that he might die an invisible man, survived only by “an apartment full of shit”.And yet, it also reinvigorates his creativity (which had stalled as well).Within months, he starts to write again, 57 years after he had previously stopped (possibly when he had finished "The History of Love" and had become an invisible man during the War?).What he writes ends up being 301 pages long, “it’s not nothing”.It’s his memoir, starting off “once upon a time”, in the manner of a fable or a fairy tale, which he almost calls “Laughing and Crying and Writing and Waiting”, but ends up naming “Words for Everything”.It’s a polite, but defiant, retort to Alma’s childhood challenge, “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”Maybe there isn’t a word for everything, but as “The History of Love” itself illustrates, in the hands of the right person, it is possible to say everything in words.Leo sends the novel off to the address he finds for Isaac, in the hope that he will read it, only to read soon after that his only child has died. (view spoiler)[And yet...what Leo accomplishes over the course of the novel is the knowledge that his son had learned the truth of their family by reading “Words for Everything” and that the true authorship of “The History of Love” had finally become known.His legacy has become concrete, and he can die content. (hide spoiler)]
"For My Grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing and For Jonathan, my life." I don't think I have started a review with the dedication before now, but in this case I believe it is appropriate. Words are the way we fight against entropy, against forgetfullness, the way we demonstrate to the world and to ourselves that we are alive, that we have a past and a future. History is the act of connecting the past with the future, and Nicole Krauss argues that the way we love is a better measure of our lives than wars or industrial revolutions or politics.Three separate strands are woven together in the novel. At first, they seem unrelated, and much of the plot is driven by the effort of a young girl named Alma Singer to find the connections between her own family history, a book called "The History of Love" written decades ago in Chile by a Polish immigrant, and a mysterious man who pays a lot of money for a translation of that book, now quasy forgotten. Also forgotten, living alone in an apartment filled with junk, is an 80 year old man named Leopold Gursky, who is afraid nobody will notice or care when he passes away. At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived. I could start now to explain and to analyze the structure of the book, or the motivations of the characters, or the style of presentation. But I have a feeling that in doing so, I will do a disservice to the story, because this gem is one of those rare magic moments where you feel that instead of you reading a novel, the book is reading you, and putting down in words what you wished you had been able to do or write about your own life (as Alma father's remarks in the dedication he writes on the first page of the book). This novel might as well be about my own grandparents and father, who died while I was still a young punk, too obsessed with myself to ask for the stories of their youth, for their histories of love. Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear and distant. Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are like photographs of photographs. I admire Alma Singer for her efforts to keep the memory of her father alive, re-reading his books on survival in the wilderness and on edible plants, inventing stories about him to tell to her small brother, pestering her grieving mother to rebuilt her life. Alma is also a teenager, so she has to cope with her own emerging feelings of love. Did I tell she also worships Antoine de Saint-Exupery? That's just one more reason to like her chapters, and the lively entries she makes in her personal diary.Yet the character I identified with most is the old Leo Gursky, the invisible man, who feels the need to drop things in the supermarker or quarell with the chashiers, even goes to pose nude for a class of art students, just to feel that somebody is noticing him, that somebody might remember him. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. And everyone who walked by was happier than I. If you don't know what Leo is talking about, I envy you, but there is more to him than meets the eye. Behind the decrepit facade and the cranky behaviour beats a heart still believing that life is "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever". In the silence of his room, he still puts words on paper, pouring out his passion and his pain, even if nobody seems interested in reading his novel. You see, he was not always 80 years old, and he can still remember the best years of his life: Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle. Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across a field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair. Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. I feel like there's nothing more to add after the last passage, without spoiling the magic. Yet, I must comment on the people disappearing from Leo and from the other people's life, because the reason the village, the houses and the fields are gone, the reason Leo and Zvi and many others are living in exile has to do with the crimes of the Nazis in the second world war. The plea against disappearance in the dedication is now extended to all the victims of the Holocaust, whose shadow is still looming over the younger generations. Nicole Krauss does a much more creditable effort in dealing with this highly charged event that the dissapointingly cute "Book Thief". She keeps the dignity of her people with understated intensity, and matter of fact enumeration of the many holes left in the personal and cultural space by the departed. A Book Within a Book ... and both of them sharing a name can be confusing at first, leading to a self-replicating loop bringing the reader from the last page back to the first. Who really wrote the book of love? Leo or Zvi or even Alma in her vivid imagination? Better yet, was it started centuries or millenia ago, and passed on from generation to generation until it landed in my hands? Is the novel published in Valparaiso still lingering on some dusty shelves in a dark second-hand bookshop that hardly anyone visits today, in the age of electronic purchases? Is there a copy of it to be found in the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona?Speaking of ages, we only get to read fragments of this fabled history, more like short essays on the ways love as the highest art of communication between people, the way we are recognized and remembered. I have tried to bookmark some of these favorite passages regarding The Age of Glass, The Age of Silence, The Birth of Feeling, but I realized I should really quote whole pages, take them out of context, and that they are better left alone, to be enjoyed the way the author meant them to be, slipped between the memories of Leo and Alma. Even so, here's a sample of what I'm talking about: The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. [...] The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's to dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood. To close my review of a novel I plan to give as a gift to my friends, one that I look forward with great pleasure as a re-read at some point in the future, I have chosen the words of one of the fictional historians. Did the book change my own life, as Zvi hoped for? Only time will tell. Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all. He couldn't have known it, but [...] at least one copy was destined to change a life - more than one life.
What do You think about The History Of Love (2006)?
This is the sort of book that I didn't expect to like, given that the title seems ridiculously ambitious. But in a moment of optimism I bought it anyway, and boy did it pay off. Nicole Krauss skirts the intimidating topic of romantic love by sneaking up behind other kinds of love and encouraging them to stop leaning against the wall at the dance and get out there and share their groove thang. She weaves together disparate threads of lives until, by the end, you see the vast, beautiful, silken ascot they all comprise together. I loved the non-linear approach, the tiny details, the quiet way she hints at what makes us human. This book is everything I hope to find when I go to fiction. It reminded me to not take anything for granted... to take love where it finds me... not to scoff at any that comes along, albeit tiny and well camoflaged. Like the Grinch, when I read this book my heart grew three sizes.
—Charissa
1. What I like about Krauss's novel.Leo Gursky's melancholy, lonely presence. The sections of the novel told from his perspective are hauntingly beautiful.Alma's precocious teenager voice. Her voice is less compelling for me than that of Leo Gursky, but still good.The slow development of the connections between Leo, Alma, Zvi Litvinoff, Isaac, and the book The History of Love, in terms not only of plot but of theme.2. What is mildly irritating about the book.Leo's habit of saying "And yet." Alma's lists. Each of her sections of the book is written in list form. It gets old after a while, even though it's an interesting conceit.The introduction of Bird, Alma's brother, as a new narrator in the last 30 or so pages of the novel. I would've preferred Krauss to find another narrative device or incorporate him more fully into the rest of the book.3. What I am not sure about yetThe structure of the ending. Bringing Alma and Leo's narrative voices together in alternating pages is a neat trick, but it involves a rather major shift in tone and pacing. What I liked about the first 80-85% of the book had a lot to do with the reflective nature of the story's development. Here, suddenly, we are moving forward in what is essentially real time and are given only short sections of each narrative voice at a time. The content of the ending. Without giving much away here, I will say that the concluding scene felt as if it wanted to be deep and meaningful, but was rather hollow instead. There is one major revelation, but it is not one that takes on the relationship between Leo and Alma (either Alma). The reader is left hanging regarding Leo and Alma as well as Leo and his book(s). 4. What else to sayDespite my hesitations about the end of the novel, it gets four stars for its compelling characters and its ability to create a mood through the development of those characters.I began this book at about 11 pm, thinking I would get a jump on it before finishing it tomorrow, but it is now 3:30 am and I have just finished the book. I did not want to stop reading it and couldn't put it down until I reached the ending. Perhaps it is that ability to draw the reader in and make her read well past her bedtime in anticipation that makes the lightweight ending so disappointing.
—Christy
***ALL SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW ARE HIDDEN***How to sum up The History of Love? Jigsaw puzzle in book form, maybe. For a book only just over 250 pages, it is quite a lot of story to mull over and piece together. This complicated tale unfolds from the point of view of no fewer than four narrators: an elderly man, Leo; a teen girl, Alma; her prepubescent brother, Bird; and a third-person omniscient narrator. Only because the human characters are so distinct and lovable does it seem there’s not one--or two or three--narrators too many. Indeed, The History of Love’s characters dazzle, and are arguably the book’s biggest strengths. That Krauss was able to so successfully tell this story from the points of view of three people very different from herself is a testament to just how skilled she is as a writer. Her abilities remind immediately of how Sara Gruen wrote in the voice of a male nursing home resident in Water for Elephants and Wally Lamb wrote in the voice of a teenage girl in She's Come Undone. Continually impressive is this story’s even balance of humor and introspection. Leo is a man who never seems to stop wondering when he will die of a heart attack. The book opens with this: “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.” This matter-of-fact melancholy permeates many of the sections he narrates; however, later in the story, he’s in full-on comedian mode: Outside, my loyal pigeon cooed and fluttered its wings against the glass. Perhaps I should have given him a name[...]I glanced around. My eye came to rest on the menu from the Chinese take-out. They haven’t changed it for years. MR. TONG’S FAMOUS CANTONESE, SZECHUAN AND HUMAN CUISINE. I tapped the window. The pigeon flapped off. Goodbye, Mr. Tong[...]Night fell and still I was lost. I hadn’t eaten all day. I called Mr. Tong. The Chinese take-out, not the bird. Sometimes you can’t heap enough praise on books that make you love a character simply because you find him so charmingly funny. The story is mostly a mystery (though the book could fall under a few genre labels), and that, along with the story’s endearing characters, keeps interest piqued. Who wrote the book within this book (also titled The History of Love)? That is what needs figuring out. Unfortunately, however, Krauss’s overall organization is lacking, and for a premise as involved as this, scrupulous attention to organization is absolutely crucial. Krauss did put effort into organizing the chapters themselves with defining visuals, and these are a nice touch. The chapters Leo narrates are headed by an anatomically correct sketch of a heart; Alma’s chapters feature a compass; the unnamed narrator’s feature an open book. Visuals are not enough, though, when the lack of organization is in the actual narrative; this book contains two stories in one, and at times that is as confusing as it sounds (two characters with the same first name do not help matters). (view spoiler)[Leo is the author of The History of Love, but for what seems much longer than necessary, Krauss has the reader believing the author is actually Leo’s childhood friend Zvi Litvinoff (hide spoiler)]
—Caroline
