Chris’s Pick
November 2015
The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
W.W. Norton and Company, Publishers, 2005
This wasn’t the book I planned to review. Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, Purity, has been at my bedside for a month, and I have finally finished slogging through it. As Franzen has been called one of America’s greatest writers, I had highly anticipated this publication. It is an interesting, very wordy, study of relationships, and parts of it are compelling. But the title of this section of our website is “Books We Love”. I did not love it. So. Instead I plucked out of my bookshelf a book I truly love and re-read it in four days.
The History of Love is an exquisite book. There are several voices that narrate this complex story, but the writing is so clever you have no problem distinguishing between them, and eventually knowing and empathizing with them.
We meet Leo Gursky first, an octogenarian Jew, who has come to New York from Poland having survived the Holocaust hiding in “trees, but also holes, cellars, and cracks”, after World War II. Leo is terrified that he has become invisible to the rest of the world, and makes a point each day to be seen—often by deliberately knocking over his coffee cup, or spilling the salt in a cafe. In Poland, he writes a novel, The History of Love, about Alma, the woman he loves. (Alma has been sent to America to escape the war, and eventually marries, thinking Leo dead. Yet Leo continues to love her until she dies, even sitting daily at her bedside in the hospital. “She was tiny and wrinkled and deaf as a doorknob. There was so much I should have said. And yet. I told her jokes.”)
Leo entrusts a friend with his precious manuscript, who later confesses it has been lost.
Alma Singer is a fourteen year old living in Brooklyn with her brother, Bird, and her mother, Charlotte, a translator. All three are separately dealing with the death of Alma’s father. Alma learns that she was named after the heroine in her father’s favorite book, The History of Love—an obscure book he finds in the window of a bookshop in Chile, written in Spanish. When a stranger commissions Charlotte to translate The History of Love into English, Alma becomes obsessed with finding the stranger, as well as finding the woman for whom she was named.
We follow the mysterious twists and turns of these two people’s lives, with the book (within a book), The History of Love, at its center. Each of Krauss’s characters is beautifully drawn. Leo stays with you long after the last page, and Alma, tenuously on the verge of adulthood, and Bird, who believes he is a lamed vovnik—a Messiah—are so endearing that you can’t help falling a little bit in love with them both.
By the end of the book, the two main characters come together, as they must, with a surprising catalyst.
Once again, Krauss’s stylistic writing becomes an important ingredient in the conclusion. And once again, I closed this book with a sigh.