The History of Love

Nicole Krauss' "History Of Love" is one of the most poignant and beautiful novels I have read in many moons - dare I say years? I do not exaggerate. Her prose is pure poetry, and her writing is a wonderful example of literature as an art form. Although this is not a Holocaust novel, per se, the Shoah casts a long shadow over the narrative. I think the book is much more a remembrance of those who died, a memorial of sorts, than a book about death. Actually, the themes here are love, survival and loss. I shed many a tear while reading, sometimes because of the author's exquisite use of language, and others because of a character's terrible sadness, but I found myself bursting into laughter more often than not at the wonderful humor. Some of the dialogue is especially witty. Oddly, I was reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work. Perhaps the sense of wonder Ms. Krauss conveys, along with elements of fantasy which intertwine with reality, form a kind of magical realism. "The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma." So wrote young, aspiring author Leopold Gursky. He actually wrote three books before he was twenty-one, before WWII invaded his hometown of Slonim, which was located "sometimes in Poland, and others in Russia." Now, years later in Brooklyn, NY, Leo has no idea what happened to his manuscript, "The History Of Love," his most important work. He wrote the novel about the only thing he knew, his love for Alma. "Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." He continued to write their story long after Alma's father sent her to America, where she would be safe from the Nazis. He even wrote after the Germans pushed East, toward his home. At age eighty, Leo feels compelled to make himself seen at least once a day. He fears dying alone in his apartment, on a day when no one sees him at all. And he is capable of doing some pretty outrageous things to garner attention, including posing in the nude for a life drawing class. Ever since the war he has felt invisible. He survived by becoming invisible. And now, he needs to be sure he exists. When he came to America, his cousin, a locksmith took him in and taught him the trade. He did so because he knew Leo could not remain invisible forever. "Show me a Jew that survives and I'll show you a magician," he used to say. Leo finds some solace in his work. "In my loneliness it comforts me to think that the world's doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me." Unbeknownst, to Leopold Gursky, his book has survived also, and has inspired others in many ways, especially to love. Alma Singer is a precocious teenager who lives in New York City. She is named for all the female characters in her father's favorite book, "A History of Love." Singer, an Israeli, bought the only copy in a store in Buenos Aires, while traveling in South America. Alma's mother, Charlotte, is an Englishwoman who met her husband while working on a kibbutz in Israel. He gave her the book, a gift, when he realized how much he cared for her. He died of pancreatic cancer when Alma was seven. Seven years later, his family is still adjusting to their loss. The sensitive girl desperately wants to ease her mother's loneliness. She also wants to learn how to survive in the wilderness, and help her brother, Bird, be a normal boy. Bird believes he may be the Messiah. Charlotte, a translator, receives a request from an anonymous stranger to translate an obscure book by a Polish exile, Zvi Litvinoff, who immigrated to Chile. She accepts the commission. The book, written in Spanish, is titled "The History of Love." Alma reads her mom's English translation and sets out to find her namesake. Her literary detective work is hilarious and her tenacity is admirable. Ms. Krauss is a master at linking her various storylines seamlessly. Her characters are a delight - all vivid and memorable for their humanity, their eccentricity, and their inner strength. The author brings them to life on the page. They have all experienced sorrow and loss, yet there is not a self-pitying voice among them. And it is impossible not to love Leo Gursky. I hear my grandmother's voice, at times, when he speaks. She died years ago, and was probably a generation older than the author's grandparents, to whom the novel is dedicated. I plan to reread "The History of Love" in a few weeks, over a weekend when I won't be disturbed. I made the mistake of taking the book with me to work, and between the train and the office, I felt the numerous interruptions seriously detracted from the glorious flow of the language. This is a novel which is meant to be read more than once, anyway. ENJOY! JANA

I will skip the plot review. I abandoned this book several times before finishing it. It is not a page-turner. Every time I picked it up again, it took me several chapters to sort out who was who. Even when I had it sorted, there was confusion. The links between characters are revealed gradually, so that the early chapters read like several independent novels. Eventually, everything is illuminated. Leo Gursky, the protagonist, wrote a novel within this novel that is presented in fragments. It is difficult to read. He writes in near stream of consciousness style. There is no discernible plot to Leo's work. It is interesting but peripheral to the story, although the author apparently wanted it to be central. One thing bothered me about the plot: Leo knew about his son, watched him from a distance at times, but never revealed himself to him. The reasons for this heartbreaking choice were not fully explored, even though it was believable, considering Leo's nature and history. It was the most compelling part of the story for me, and the result was slightly disappointing. The most frequent sentence in this story consists of just two words: "And yet." The author does a pretty good job of capturing the cadences of a Polish-Jewish immigrant's English. The characters speak in different voices, yet they all share certain characteristics: a constant interest in bodily functions, a tendency to think tenderly while speaking sharply, and a tendency to isolate themselves. They all live with the loneliness and depression of holocaust survivors and their families. And yet. Finally this book is about love, as the title suggests. In spite of my occasional confusion and boredom, love runs through the whole of it. The ending is an affirmation of love, and for that I salute the author. There is no more worthy topic for a novel.

My book club LOVED this book. We are a picky bunch and seem to take pleasure to taking apart one book after another. Not this one. Each of us found something different to like here. That made it the perfect pick for a book club discussion. So what's to like? First and most obvious is the intricate and clever puzzle of the story line. On the surface, it seems completely implausible--how could all these events, all these characters, on four continents, possibly fit together? Not only do they fit together, but each event is intricately motivated; each flows naturally into the next, and careful use of language knits them all together at another layer down. It is a pleasure just to delve into the craft required to do this so fluidly. Frankly, I don't know how Krauss does it, but it is lovely to experience. Next is the pervasive balancing act that so many reviewers have marveled at, between happiness and sadness, between humor and despair. Every mention of happiness is tinged with a sense of potential loss or disappointment; every loss is tempered by hope or at least an unwillingness (sometimes unconscious) to surrender. This subtle balancing act builds a rich, bittersweet sense throughout the novel. It kept me from seeing how funny the novel is during my first reading. A second reading let me relax into some of the silliest, even surreal situations, allowing me to appreciate the warm, human feeling of them in ways that I never did with comparable situations in Kafka or Borges. But enough of that; don't forget the characters, brought to life in the most disarming and unexpected ways. Some of us loved Leo; others found him a whining, tired old man. But all of us could agree that he was very much alive in our imaginations. I personally favored the young wild man, Bird. He is so determined to be something extraordinary as he stumbles forward in the most human ways. And--we disagreed about this, but I firmly believe--he became something extraordinary in the broader story of healing the deep wounds inflicted by the Holocaust. Krauss manages the Holocaust as a hole in a whole community's life--as an obstruction in the middle of the room that everyone must find a way around without admitting it is there. To convey this idea, Krauss talks very little about the Holocaust. Rather, it inhabits the margins of the story at every turn. We argued about this--part of the fun--but I believe Krauss constructed an intricately crafted web of connections that link all the characters in the book through multiple channels. She presents the Holocaust as a mass extinction that sought to sever these links and ultimately failed, but not without transforming the lives of at least three generations of Jews. She shows us the effects on each generation in myriad details in each character's everyday life. I ran into trouble trying to lead our book group toward a conclusion that the book is (among many other things) a parable about how literature and individual lives freely intermingle in the history of the global Jewish community and how sheer love of life, in its simplest, most basic every-day forms, sustained that community through a mass extinction. The book holds open a promise that this community can reconnect to the roots that nurtured and fostered it in the days before so many left their hopes and dreams and loves behind in Europe. So, those who have read the book will understand why I could not describe the closing pages of the book to my wife. Hilarious on one level, devastating on another. I was too emotionally moved even to read to her, much less try to describe, the extraordinary call and response between Leo and the Alma who kept him alive through so much. Maybe it's just me.... But wait, there's more! Krauss plays intricate games with literary criticism. She uses four narrators with very distinct voices, two speaking in the first person, one in the second, and a fourth (at least part of the time) in a clever mix of first and second as one character reads the first-person account of a second character. She toys with arguments about the relative importance of author and text by presenting The History of Love in what I experienced as a series of scrims--first, the true life of Alma Mereminski; second, Leo's perception of her as a vehicle to keep himself alive; the third, Zvi's theft or appropriation of Leo's image of Alma to impress his girlfriend, one that combines Zvi's respect for the original Alma (he preserves her name) and Zvi's recognition of Leo's role as author with the disembodied text itself, which Zvi translates into Spanish; fourth, Charlotte's translation into English, framed by an entirely different and complex agenda. Each "translator" brings a new author's perspective to a story, generating a new text. So how exactly do all these perspectives and the contexts that generate them relate to the texts? What does each text embody, in and of itself? And let's not forget Isaac's appropriation of Leo's text after Isaac is dead! Very clever. There is so much here. I could go on, but enough. I expect to reread this novel many times in the future and to find new things with each reading. It is a pleasure, intellectually and emotionally, and a pleasure to share with friends. So. Stop reading these reviews and go read The History of Love for yourself!

I, too, think this book has much beautiful prose in it and the skeleton of a wonderfully evocative story if only it were written by another author. As soon as Krauss starts developing the parallel story of Alma, her mother, and her savant or obsessive/compulsive brother, only the densest reader could not know how this will end. From that point on, everything seemed so contrived that, if I hadn't needed to finish the book for book club, I would have put it down. I kept reading all the reviews about how brilliant this books is but, frankly, it left me cold. At no point did I ever feel emotionally invested in the characters, a condition that, to me, differentiates a truly satisfying read from a mere read. I have spent days trying to figure out what others are seeing that I don't only to finally conclude that many mainstream book reviewers are so captivated by the word play and stark departure from narrative writing that they cannot see the sheer artifice behind the curtain. Throughout the interlocking stories, my mind glommed onto one glaringly obvious structural support after another that I knew would finally result in the only obvious denouement. What they see as magical realism, I see as the simple sleight of hand of a too slow magician. Krauss's depiction of Leo is indeed incredible, splendidly redolent of so many eastern European immigrant old men of my childhood. Considering that Krauss was not yet 30 when she wrote this, I am especially awed. On the other hand, I thought Leo was a putz. Some reviewers mention how he "never met his son". By this, I suppose they mean they were never properly introduced. But Leo saw his son often if only from afar. For over sixty years, he followed his son's development, from the time he tied his shoes on the way to school to his success as a writer. If Leo had really wanted his son to know him, he had many chances when he attended Isaac's book readings; at that point, his son was an adult and would not have been traumatized by the sudden revelation of an unknown father. But, of course, allowing Leo to react as a normal person would have removed a glaringly obvious building block from Krauss's story. I became incensed by the utter lack of reaction to Alma's brother Bird's obvious mental illness. A child who believes he's the Jewish messiah? A child so into his fantasy life even as a 12-year-old that he believes he can fly like an angel? A child who is so unsupervised that he can build an ark from trash near a New York City highway? Why was this child not receiving psychiatric help? How did he survive in school where surely he would have been bullied into abject withdrawal? Where was his mother? His teachers? And that brings us to Bird's and Alma's mother. Here is a woman in modern times who, seven years after her husband's untimely death, is still virtually incapable of getting out of bed. Where are social services when we need them? Not until she receives the letter requesting that she translate the hardly-mysterious-at-this-point book does she act like a mother who has children to feed and clothe. I can only conclude that Krauss' determination to trick out her words and sentences at the expense of character development renders these people no more than cardboard cut-outs standing in for real narrative exposition. Face it -- we know more about Leo's maybe-imaginary friend Bruno than we do about Alma's mother. So now we come to the ending, one that so many readers declare so moved and amazed them with its brilliance and beauty, a "momentous and satisfying final chapter of great emotional depth". Huh? Satisfying? In what way is an absurdly predictable ending satisfying? In what way does virtual silence punctured by monosyllabic words and inane finger taps constitute emotional depth? And let's discuss those finger taps. Were they supposed to echo the chapter in Leo's book about silent communication and hand gestures? Or were they to reflect the taps Leo and Bruno would make on their radiators to assure each other that they were still alive? Is this what passes for depth to writers who seem hell-bent on engineering clever novels that deceive readers into believing they're great literature? And, please tell me, what is the history of love? This book certainly didn't tell me. So I say again, this could have been a beautifully rendered and equisitely tangled story of love found and lost and found again in a different place and time by a writer intent on really telling a story and not twisting dissociate bits into what is really nothing more than a long outline posturing as something truly profound. Nicole Krauss has the seeds of a great story-teller within her along with an amazing way with words so often absent in others; I can only hope that with her her next book, she discards the forced chicanery and fulfills that potential.

History of Love In reading History of Love by Nicole Krauss, I was reminded of the adage, "God is Love". Carefully crafted, History of Love is a novel within a novel that chronicles the lives of characters who talk about the fruition and loss of their loves, the beauty of erotic love, the power of parental love, the blessings of filial love, love of country, love of God and of angels that love the living. My final conclusion is that this novel is about God and Love. The Greek words that describe these forms of love are eros, agape, storge and filia; common themes that run in classic literature. My experience with this novel is elation from reading about ordinary lives that become extraordinary because of their being gifted with "love", and their exploring and living their lives with "love" and then arriving at the conclusion that indeed, all our relationships are instant pictures of how we relate to God. This may be a big stretch of the imagination but let me prove this by citing the following parts in the novel, hopefully, touching on how in most acts of creative work, man transports himself toward God, and he wonders what God is really all about, and what love is all about. 1. Ziv Litvinoff, the boyhood friend of Leo Gursky, and who rewrote "History of Love" in Chile, wrote on his desk where the words Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad, (Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.) were etched on the sides. "so that every time Litvinoff sat down to write at its sloped surface, he would consciously or unconsciously utter a prayer - nothing of the....." p.67 Litvinoff would write his plagiarized version of the History of Love invoking this prayer. "History of Love" first gets published in Spanish and finds its way in the bookstores, to be picked up by a young Israeli (David Singer) and brings it home to his wife in New York. 2. In "The Remedy", "Sing" and the books written by Isaac Moritz, Leo's son, the consistent themes that he writes about was man's relationship with God. "The root of his art was a passionate humanism and an unflinching exploration of man's relationship with his God". p.79 Leo Gursky's son was a famous writer and was the same man (Jacob Marcus) who wanted Eleanor Singer to translate the Spanish versions of "History of Love". Isaac Mortiz was the lovechild of Alma Merimisky and Leo Gursky, and was the son that Leo lived for. Leo followed his son's career and cherished him in spite of the fact that Isaac did not know him as his father. 3. In the chapter on Love among the Angels (Chapter 18 in the original History of Love) Leo Gursky wrote , "The Arguments between Angels are eternal and lack hope of solution. This is because they argue about what it means to be among the living, and because they don't know they can only speculate, much the way the Living speculates about the nature (or lack thereof) - here the kettle began to scream - of God". p. 186. Unlike men, angels cannot love each other but are in love with the living. They have no idea what romantic love is. "This is not to say that they don't feel love, because they do; sometimes they feel it so strongly that they think they're having a panic attack....But the love that they feel is not for their own kind but for the Living who they can neither understand, nor smell, nor touch. It is a general love for the living ." p.186 There are other subtle passages that are in the novel, much of it is about the Jewish faith that centers around "connectedness" in the most unexpected places, Poland, Russia, New York, Valparaiso, Santiago. Young Alma Singer's life gets connected to Leo Gursky's as they both meet, to unfold the mystery behind what happened to the original manuscript of History of Love, and the whereabouts of the original Alma in the novel. Young Alma Singer also discovers the true origins of her namesake. Here are two lives that intersect amidst the differences in time and place of where the original "History of Love" began.

Nicole Krauss has written a convoluted story of love lost and the emotional reconciliation for that loss, of course recognizing that reconciliation is never complete or just compensation. The basic story is of a young Jewish man and woman in Poland who are childhood lovers, but through the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II are separated and are never able to repair their relationship after each has moved forward with new lives and relationships. At least this is the case for Alma, the beautiful Jewish girl who escapes from Poland as a pregnant unmarried woman trying to survive in the new world. For her lover, Leo Gursky, the vast emptiness remains since he loses both Alma and his son, Isaac. Leo has written a book about his love for Alma but the chaos of war and terror leads him to believe that it has been lost. A second storyline in the novel involves Leo's competitive journalist best friend, Zvi, who survives the war by fleeing to Chili where he marries the younger and charming Rosa. He has brought with him Leo's novel which he hides for many years until he decides to translate it from Yiddish to Spanish as a gift to his wife and to impress her. Rosa pushes Zvi to publish the book in Spanish in Latin America, which Zvi reluctantly does since it is not his book. Eventually Rosa realizes the truth and realizes that Zvi's love for her was the driving force in the deception. The book is purchased and read in Buenos Aires by an American Jew, David Singer, and given to his wife Charlotte. The book so impresses both of them that they name their daughter Alma after the central character in the novel. The third story line is a request from a mysterious Jacob Marcus to translate the Spanish novel into English. Marcus makes this request of Charlotte Singer, a professional translator, after the death of her beloved husband David. Yet a meddlesome young Alma Singer gets into the action and tries to sort out who Alma, Leo, Zvi, and Jacob Marcus could really be. Through a maze of letters, manuscripts, translations, and twists of fate, the characters interact. Some of the characters have long been dead, others imaginary, and others living in another world of their own reality. Yet together they weave a tapestry of how painful loss colors human existence. For in this novel, as in many novels, a central theme is that human existence is a series of losses and attempts to recover from those loses. This is the theme that Leo uses for the second novel he writes, which ironically is also published under the name of another. The book certainly deserves 4 stars for its vibrant characters and wonderful humor by which painful life experiences are explored with a touch of wit. Yet, the book does not warrant five stars. The reason for this is that Krauss has woven too complicated a plot of too many twists and turns, leaving the reader in the situation of trying to savor the resolution of events while trying to remember hundreds of mundane hints and lose ends left hanging throughout the novel. Less artifice and more art would be appropriate here. The technique began to overpower the message. Her literary tricks become predominant whereas the tragedy of the characters receded. Less virtuosity would have produced a stronger novel.

This is a great book. Krauss writes fearlessly about love and death. The pursuit of love and the avoidance of death are the two big impulses behind most of our activity on earth, and are the two big themes of literature, as well. Krauss writes in a whole new way about the joy and the sorrow, the hope and the fear, that go along with love and death, and she adds in something beautiful: how we use words to try to control both love and death, to further our happiness, stave off our misery, and find a bearable truth in the sometimes unbearable reality of living. Despite the heavy themes, there is a good deal of humor and good-natured spirit in "The History of Love". It is a survival manual of sorts, not so different from the "How to Survive in the Wild" guide treasured by one of the characters in the book. All the characters in the book have known death, the truth of which they are trying to deal with, and love, the pursuit of which they have run from or are fully engaged in. They use words -- as Leopold writes, "words for everything" -- to avoid the truth or to confront the truth of death, and to find for themselves a safe place for love to be. Words in the book are translated, they are hidden away, they are plagiarized and they are revealed: through all the manifestations, the words are powerful. And when the words are too powerful, gestures take over the role of communication: one tap (no) or two taps (yes) to convey answers to a lifelong question. Is love worth it? Two taps. "The History of Love" is the story of Leo Gursky: "He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life." And it is the story of every person affected by the book he wrote for the woman he loved: the friend who lost everyone and to find someone again, stole the story; Alma, the woman who starred, again and again, in the story (she is the soul of the story, as "alma" means soul in Spanish); the son who had the story read to him and only too late comes to understand its significance; a different Alma, trying to help her mother find love again, trying to help her brother Bird be normal and not be a chosen one, and trying to understand the life of a woman who left Poland, leaving love behind, and began love and life all over again. Krauss' characters range in age from very old to very young, and include the dead who live on vividly in memory. They are all distinctly drawn as very real humans, with fear and sadness, desires and weaknesses. The ones left alive have a will to survive, some stronger than others, and their unfailing strength to pursue a path they do not completely understand -- to finally share the book written about "everything", to plant a garden, to go to a house in Connecticut, to attend a funeral, or hunt through old city records in a series of dusty offices -- will, in the end, bring them knowledge and maybe even some peace, before the end. This is a life-affirming, heart and tear duct pumping, and even funny at times, wonderful book about the power of words. The power comes from the people who write the words, the people who inspire the stories, and the people who read the words, becoming inspired themselves. "The History of Love" is joyous song in favor of the mind and the heart and the body and the soul, and the celebration that occurs when all four work together, the celebration called love. For more reviews, go to [...]

"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. " "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl whose father was shrewd enough to scrounge together all the zloty he had to send his youngest daughter to America... At night he stayed up writing his book. He sent her a letter into which he’d copied eleven chapters in tiny In the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen drove deeper east, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews. On a bright, hot day in July, they entered Slonim. At that hour, the boy happened to be lying on his back in the woods thinking about the girl. You could say it was his love for her that saved him. In the years that followed, the boy became a man who became invisible. In this way, he escaped death. Once upon a time a man who had become invisible arrived in America. He’d spent three and a half years hiding, mostly in trees, but also cracks, cellars, holes. Then it was over. The Russian tanks rolled in. For six months he lived in a Displaced Persons camp. He got word to his cousin who was a locksmith in America... Finally his papers came through. He took a train to a boat, and after a week he arrived in New York Harbor. A cool day in November. Folded in his hand was the address of the girl. That night he lay awake on the floor of his cousin’s room. The radiator clanged and hissed, but he was grateful for the warmth. In the morning his cousin explained to him three times how to take the subway to Brooklyn. He bought a bunch of roses but they wilted because though his cousin had explained the way three times he still got lost. At last he found the place. Only as his finger pressed the doorbell did the thought cross his mind that perhaps he should have called... At last he managed three words: Come with me. The sound of children shouting came from the street below. She squeezed her eyes shut. Come with me, he said, holding out his hand. Tears rolled down her face. Three times he asked her. She shook her head. I can’t, she said. She looked down at the floor. Please, she said. And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away. And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it. And having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn’t know he existed didn’t seem unthinkable. Not if it was what the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?" "I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. I used to let the door slam in people’s faces. I farted where I wanted to fart. I accused cashiers of cheating me out of a penny, while holding the penny in my hand. And then one day I realized I was on my way to being the sort of schmuck who poisons pigeons. People crossed the street to avoid me. I was a human cancer. And to be honest: I wasn’t really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn’t know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It’s not too late. The first days were strange. I had to practice smiling in front of the mirror. But it came back to me. It was as if a weight had been lifted. I let go, and something let go of me." This quote pretty much sums up the premise of this book. Leo is the boy in love and writes a book called the History of Love and Alma is the girl who breaks his heart and Isaac is the son he never gets to know. Leo turns into a bitter old man until he lets his anger go and begins to write another book, The Words For Everything. He thinks his first book, The History of Love, was destroyed but actually his childhood friend ends up publishing it in South America in Spanish and claiming it as his own. A young man ends up picking up a copy of the History of Love in his travels and names his daughter, Alma, after the girl in the book. When the man dies, his wife is asked to translate the book into English and his daughter Alma starts researching her namesake. I loved the writing in this book and the characters. I thought this was hilarious and sad at the same time like when Leo as an old man will knock over displays in stores and mess up Starbucks orders and make scenes in public just because he does not want to die on a day when he is not seen. Even though the book is about a book called the History of Love, you see the different kinds of love-- young romantic love, obsessive love, mother- daughter love, father-son love, afraid-to-be -in-love love, etc. and the damage that secrets and lies and grudges can do. The plot was confusing to follow at times but the writing made up for it and this is a book that I will read again and again and probably get something different from it every time. I rated this 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads

Book Review The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Genre - Romance, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction. "He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard." At a delicate age of fourteen Alma Singer tries to play a matchmaker for her mother. She worries about her mother's loneliness in the most endearing way. In this quest she discovers an old book that her mother is translating with so much love and this further leads her to believe that the author would be the answer to her worries. Leo Gursky an old man who lives in New York is trying to live a little longer. He pines for his long lost love sixty years ago in Poland and his son who never knew him. A love that inspired him to write a book that he believes is lost forever. He is completely unaware that in one corner of the world the book was published as well as touched and changed many lives. I have to start by saying that of all the books I have read on my kindle, this has the most highlighted quotes. A book about longing, love, innocence, survival and relationships. And above all it is filled with so many witty lines. From the very beginning the author carries the story on such strong narratives. Yes, there are multiple narratives, each one handled with such delicacy. The theme never falters once. The characters are sketched out realistic, robust and relatable. Be it the fourteen year old Alma or her brother Bird just nine years old who believes himself to be a messiah. Not once did I feel that the descriptions were too lengthy or the longing too heavy and depressing. Ms. Krauss took me through laughter to finally tears that left my heart warm. Most of all the ending left me on a note that gave me room to fill in my own conclusions. I loved that bit. The author's unique flair to make me ponder, relish and savour every thought kept me coming back to it and wanting more. This is the first book, I read of the author. I look forward to reading more of her books for sure. I would definitely recommend it those who love a good literary fiction.

I just finished the History of love by Nicole Krauss and I am speechless! I want to read it all over again!!! The book arrived a couple of days ago at my doorstep and after a couple of pages I found myself reading it everywhere and at every time of the day! My breaks from work were more welcomed than ever because they were giving me time to spend with this amazing story! I loved every character. Leo and his genius, Alma and her strength, Bird and his heart... An amazing tale that you absolutely MUST read!

A nice read !

Kraus, Nichole The History of Love This novel engages immediately with the story of Leo Gursky – a lonely, old refugee from Nazi Europe, with a sad life of devotion, self-sacrifice and fearful self-negation. The tale is enlivened by classic Jewish humour and particularly the theme that he deliberately makes a fool of himself in public so that when he dies alone at home, others will remember when they saw him last. He copes with his fear and sorrow through making himself small, keeping to himself, avoiding bad memories, but most of all, living in fantasy, writing about himself or these fantasies and longing for what was lost. He is a hero, sacrificing his one connection - a son being brought up by another - for the stability of mother and son. He is relentless in his depiction of himself, his old-man deterioration, but kind to others. The secondary story is of a young girl who lived with her deeply grieving mother and her younger brother. Both children are affected – the boy acts strangely and the girl writes of her obsession with finding out about her father, and also getting her mother to re-marry. Each uses unique methods to make sense of life and live in reality. Leo is the thread throughout that links a series of stories, often fantastical, around the book ‘The History of Love’ and ultimately, at the last moment, explains the confusion and apparent discrepancies, particularly as to who wrote what, when; it also solves one loss for Leo. The conditions of Leo’s life are described with humour and poignancy. There is much humour of the Jewish-style vernacular, body failures, personal shame, rough affection for people's failings. "I sat. I stood. I rotated so that those who hadn't gotten my rectal side now got it." ..a wet spot bloomed in my crotch and that made me laugh even harder. I was banging the table and fighting for air, I thought: Maybe this is how I’ll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, … I wanted to describe the world because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells s***? – small daily humiliations – these I take, generally speaking in the liver. Other damage I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over… Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes… The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine… Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all. Wood smoke rises from the chimney, and through the window I can almost see my mother leaning over a table. I run toward the house. I can feel the cold wind against my cheeks. I reach out my hand. And because my head is full of dreams, for a moment I believe I can open the door and go right through it. Some stories are hard to follow, such as the man who believed his butt was made of glass, but the perceptive writing of his vulnerability and fears reveals their universality. Similarly, the mock scientific history of man’s development, while very strange, is revealing of human relationships: Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood. When his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow. Litvinoff’s life was defined by a delight in the weight of the real; his friend’s by a rejection of reality, with its army of flat-footed facts. Krause has developed a distinctive style of writing that not only is a marvellous evocation of this old Jewish man's mind, but shows a perceptive and descriptive genius. “In the years that followed, this boy became a man who became invisible. In this way he escaped death." "... It stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in an act of creativity." This plant is also a metaphor for himself. "Her kiss was a question I wanted to spend my whole life answering". The anecdote of his face not appearing in a photo emphasises his invisibility and struggle to exist alone. "The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have lived and the lives we did lead had shut in our faces. Or, better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head." The vivid poignancy of his loneliness! What is the role of fantasy and gross humour in the book? For example, the angel who wonders about his purpose as he deteriorates, and the coarse neighbour Grossman. Sometimes a seemingly pointless and silly anecdote is inserted, such as the blind photographer and the chopped liver sandwich. There are passages of mock archeological philosophy that will also reveal themselves, I think, as wise comments on life and relationships, possibly. "...loudmouths had no less need for it, for those used to being overheard by everyone for often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone." I found it necessary to read this book twice in order to fully understand the narrative threads and to appreciate the perceptive force and originality of the writing. Possibly next time I read this book the questions about the humour and apparently unconnected anecdotes will be revealed. Or is the complexity and mystery of the writing and narrative a con, a cunning marketing tool? I was left with feelings of sadness at the loneliness of loss, redeemed somewhat by people’s drive to make things right and their concern for others.

Ein wunderbare Buch, das mich – als ich vor zehn Jahren zum ersten Mal danach greifen wollte – wegen seines Bestseller-Charakters abgestoßen hatte, mich nun aber, wegen seiner Erzählkraft, seiner Vielfalt, seiner Reflexionstiefe und seiner Multiperspektivität, die jedoch wunderbar zusammengebunden wird, begeistert. Ein wunderbares Buch. Ein Schatz. Ein junger Mann schreibt ein Buch, in dem er die Liebe zu seiner Freundin beschreibt, es gibt nur dieses eine Exemplar, das in den Wirren des Krieges, der Vertreibung und Tötung der Juden, der Flucht verloren gegangen scheint – während die beiden auf verschiedenen Wegen nach Amerika emigrieren dürfen. Der Text erscheint zuerst in Spanisch und wird dann von der Mutter eines Mädchens übersetzt, das fortan die Fäden in die Hände nimmt, erzählt, Begriffe definiert, Notate macht, während der inzwischen sehr alte Autor in einem Appartment in Manhattan sitzt und erst sehr erfährt, dass das Script gerettet wurde. Großartig.