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The History of Love

nicole krauss

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Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author.

Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives...

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

255 pages, Paperback

First published May 17,2005
Literary awards
orange prize, edward lewis wallant award, borders original voices award, william saroyan international prize for writing, prix du meilleur livre Étranger, premi llibreter de narrativa, 
Places
new york city new york, slonim, 

This edition

Format
255 pages, Paperback
Published
May 17, 2006 by W. W. Norton \u0026 Company
ISBN
9780393328622
ASIN
0393328627
Language
English
Characters More characters

More editions

About the author

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nicole krauss

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Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
38(38%)
4 stars
28(28%)
3 stars
33(33%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
99 reviews All reviews
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happypasta1111
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A lost, found, and plagiarized book about love unites the stories of Holocaust survivors/victims, widows, fatherless children, and lovers. The engaging structure of the story eventually ties these characters together and reveals the impact the book has on their lives.

But such insightful and beautiful prose, such substantial and meaningful passages seem spoiled by attempts at "cutesy" writing. It appeared contrived and it cheapened the impact of the dialogue for me.

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nuts4everafter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Long ago and far away a boy fell in love with a girl. This love inspired him to write, and part of what he wrote about were the stages in human evolution that hadn't gotten very much attention. Around the time of the Stone Age, for example, there was also an Age of Glass when "everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile." In addition, there was an Age of Silence when people spoke only with their hands. But because we do so very many other things with our hands, sometimes there were misunderstandings. There were times a person might be performing a task and was mistakenly thought to be saying, instead, "Now I realize I was wrong to love you." Because, yes, there was a gesture for the question: Was I wrong to love you?

And I thought, sitting there with my book, reading, minding my own business, I thought: Well, there's the question I've been trying to put into words for the last ten damn years. Because this is what your heart starts screaming when people you care about begin to die. (Live long enough, do everything right, it doesn't matter, people you care about still begin to die.) And I'm not proud of this. I'm not proud that my heart has this question on its lips most of the time. Was I wrong to love you? Because, if I hadn't, it certainly wouldn't hurt this much to bury you, my friend.

There are a lot of reasons The History of Love deserves a thorough reading. And it's not just about these Ages of Man - it's about what became of the boy's scribblings, what use was made of them by other people, and it's also about a brilliantly-rendered fourteen-year-old named Alma Singer who is desperate for her mother to be happy and her brother to be sound. And it's a puzzle of a thing that will glide you all over emotional creation before it tethers itself to solid ground. But most of all...most of all...it may do for you what it did for me. It may put words to whatever it is your heart's been screaming.
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Kyougi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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کتاب فوق العاده ای نیست، اگر صرفا به خاطر ترجمه ترانه علیدوستی تصمیم به خوندنش بگیرید، چندان براتون دلچسب نخواهد بود. نه اینکه ترجمه بد بشه فقط میتونست ترجمه روان تری داشته باشه. موضوع خود کتاب جالب بود، و به شخصه فکر میکنم با همین موضوع نویسنده میتونست کتاب بهتری ارائه کنه.
قسمت هایی که آلما تعریف میکنه رو بیشتر دوست داشتم، قسمت های آخر کتاب هم جذاب تر هستند.
در نهایت فکر میکنم اگر توی مدت زمان کمتری این کتاب رو میخوندم بیشتر جذبم میکرد ولی باز هم نمیتونست قانعم کنه که ۵ستاره کامل بدم.
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HandA711
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Holding hands...is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

I just finished and I am sad I am done. This isn't a romance, but a beautiful, quirky piece of literary fiction. If I attempted to summarize the plot, it would be an injustice as I could never capture the finely developed characters, the beautiful prose and the laugh out loud moments that make this book unique. All I can say is that I highly recommend it. It is a rare gem.
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TAK3Z0
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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زمستون پارسال تا صفحه ٦٠ خوندم، اولاش خوبه ولى بعدش خيلى خيلى درهم‌برهم می‌شه
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Lukatta
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?"

What a reading experience! I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about its premise. All I knew was that it is highly regarded by many of my Goodreads friends. What you should know is that right after I finished reading it, I spent the rest of the day rereading and underlining passages and clues I might have overlooked. Did you find yourself doing the same thing after watching The Sixth Sense for the first time? Don't lie!

This book is a compelling, heartwarming study of loneliness, loss and adolescence. At least ten to fifteen characters are inadvertently drawn together by a book published soon after World War II called The History of Love. The mystery behind its author and publication, and the different lives it touches up to present day unfold in a series of personal journal entries. Central to the novel are a group of teenagers who each survive and/or escape the Nazi occupation of Poland only to find the overwhelming loneliness and grief that awaits them when they attempt to "start over."

I guess it depends on what you're going through at the moment, but this book just made my heart hurt so much. Not enough to cry, but enough to remind me that I am human, and that we all have personal circumstances that we're struggling to overcome. Sometimes one good day in a gloomy month is so precious that we dread the setting of the sun. The more I think about it, the more questions I have. Love is such a complex thing, whether it's fufilled, reciprocated, or never comes to fruition...it can be the thing that pushes us forward and makes us get out of bed every morning. That is pretty powerful, and Krauss did a magnificent job of relaying that message.
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Ghostfriendly
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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نمی دونم چرا اینقدر نوشتن راجع بهش سخته. نمی دونم بعضی جمله های این کتاب چطور منو به این اندازه داخل کتاب می کشید
از اسم کتاب توقع یک داستان عاشقانه رو دارید؟
این کتاب راجع به عشق نیست، راجع به زندگیه که عشق هم جزیی از اونه

لئوپولد یک مرد یهودیه که با حمله نازی ها فرار می کنه و به سختی خودش رو به آمریکا می رسونه و در این فرار همه چیزش رو از دست میده. حتی عشق زندگیش رو. حالا لئوپولد یک پیرمرده که از مرگ در تنهایی می ترسه

آلما دختری 15 ساله ست که اسمش از روی شخصیت اصلی کتاب مورد علاقه پدر مادرش یعنی "تاریخ عشق" گذاشته شده. آلما در حال کنار اومدن با مرگ پدرشه و پیدا کردن راهی برای خوشحال کردن مادرش

این دو داستان در موازات هم حرکت می کنند. ولی کجا قراره به هم برسند؟ حدس زدنش سخته چون داستان پیچیدست

داستان هایی که از چندین دید روایت می شن این ریسک رو دارند که با بعضی شخصیت ها ارتباط برقرار نشه. من عاشق لئوپولد بودم و منتظر تکه هایی که راوی می شد. عاشق دید عجیبش به دنیا، غم عمیقش. ولی راجع به آلما اینطور نبود
فرهنگ یهودی در این کتاب موج می زنه و برای من جالب و خواندنی بود ولی تکه های کوچکی که در رابطه با اسرائیل بود و سختی هایی (!) که برای ساکن شدن در اونجا کشیدند، سخت بود که با علاقه بخونم

به خاطر جمله های فوق العاده ش می دونم که حداقل تکه اول این کتاب رو دوباره می خونم. به خاطر لئوپولد. به خاطر کتابی که در بین صفحات این کتاب مخفی شده و از تاریخ عشق می گه، ولی نه اونطور که همه فکر می کنند. فقط باید این جمله هارو بخونید تا بفهمید چی می گم

حتی هنوز هم تمام احساسات ممکن وجود ندارند. هنوز حس هایی هستند که فراتر از ظرفیت و تخیل ما هستند. گاهی اوقات، وقتی قطعه موسیقی ای که کس ��یگری ننوشته، یا نقاشی ای که کس دیگری نکشیده یا چیز دیگری که پیش‌بینی، تصور و یا توضیح آن غیرممکن است ایجاد می شود، حس جدیدی وارد دنیا می شود
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