The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was on the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist in 2006, and a beautiful book bringing many characters together in a stunning and heartfelt conclusion. Told in many alternate points of view, we learn of the plight of Leopold Gurskey as he flees his home in Poland to escape the Nazis during World War II and emigrates to New York City. One of the most haunting quotes is the fear as he ages that he will die unseen and was so beautifully captured in this lovely line:

n  

"All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."

n

This is a book within a book, The History of Love. Its elements, provenance and meanings are dramatically interwoven throughout the book. It is a spellbinding and riveting book as the myriad stories begin to come together in a dramatic conclusion. I loved the book, not only for its smart plotting, but the beautiful magical elements and poignant moments present throughout the novel. The non-linear structure as well as the introduction of many characters in a sometimes very different format, added to the interest of the narrative. Nicole Krauss is known for exploring Jewish history and identity and this was no exception.

"Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined 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 learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the amoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

It's funny how just straightening up your bookshelves can lead to opening a book just to read the first couple lines...next thing you know you've read half of it.

____________________________________________________


I never expected this to be so good. Really, it was just beautiful. Just thinking about Leo Gursky's character gives me a lump in my throat. Even typing his name, I'm blinking back tears.

I loved this book.

Life is unfair, life is cruel, that should be the lesson taken away by Leo Gursky, a Polish Holocaust survivor, but the lesson he seems to have taken instead is that once there was love and that is sometimes enough. His love centers around the girl he loved in Poland, Alma Mereminski, the woman for whom he wrote a book, The History of Love.

This book influences a number of lives, including that of a young girl who is also named Alma because her father found the book in a store in Buenos Aires and it changed his life. Our Alma struggles with her own questions about life, the loss of her father, the continued depression of her mother, the coping mechanisms of her strange little brother, Bird. In mysterious and compelling ways, a group of lives become entangled in this love story and we readers are left to sort out the truth from the fiction and sort the pieces into a puzzle that makes sense.

I will admit to feeling lost a couple of times, wondering if I had missed something, but like a good mystery, this story unravels in stages and all comes together by the end. It is masterfully woven, deeply personal, highly emotional. Krauss imagines real people, gives them breath and feeling. I cannot imagine anyone reading this novel with indifference.

In addition to a superb story, Krauss has a lot to say about subjects that have meaning for all of us. Life, death, love, connection, separation, loss, depression. She is a student of the human heart.

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn’t find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.

And she has the power to produce an image that is palpable:

The War ended. Bit by bit, Litvinoff learned what had happened to his sister Miriam, and to his parents, and to four of his other siblings (what had become of his oldest brother, Andre, he could only piece together from probabilities). He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face.

She does not describe the horror of the camps, we get no stories of the atrocities, there is no dwelling on the death or destruction; and yet we feel the horror of it, the irreversibility, the calamity of lives lost and the loneliness and desperation of the life that remains.

I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh--someone who knew someone told me he’d last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I’d taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else’s. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that someplace along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?

The events of this book do not take place in the War, but the War looms in the background and we know that without it all of these lives would have taken a different path. There only one thing that is carried out of that war-torn world, and that is the love. None of the love is lost. But the pain that arises from the love might be the sharpest pain of all.

I do wish there was a button for novels that exceed the greatest expectation, but all there is to distinguish this from any other five-star novel is my favorites folder. So, in it goes. If you have not read it, don’t miss it.

Finally, a thank you to Elyse, who told me more than once that I “needed” to read this. Ah, Elyse, how wise you are.

4.5 stars

Wow, why did I not read this book sooner? It was absolutely beautiful. And while it was quite short, just over 250 pages, I think that it's succinctness was necessary. It never dragged. And with the interweaving storylines of four different perspectives, it moved quickly.

I really loved Leo and Alma as characters. I loved seeing how the book The History of Love came into play in their stories too. I love the technique, kind of like in  Station Eleven, of having one item, like a book, reach across many places and years and people to connect humans.

My only complaint, which is really a minor one and kind of funny if you know me, is that this book reminded me a lot of  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (which happens to be my favorite book of all time). The author, Nicole Krauss, used to be married to him, and this book actually was published 1 month after ELAIC. So it's not surprising that the storytelling techniques, writing style, and characterization were all pretty similar. But nothing, in my opinion, can hold a candle to ELAIC.

Nevertheless, this was an excellent book that I will for sure read again. I would recommend this book to almost anyone.

4 ✚ ★
Reading this book requires all your sensors working, your full attention, GPS would help.
It’s uniquely special among all my reads. Even when I began to lose my way from reader’s fatigue it was still remarkable, that’s how good the writing is. You appreciate it even while your brain is firing Say what? It followed a taxing book and suffered in a bad timing tailwind.
"And yet."
It’s pretty special. Did I tell you that? It’s my failing that I can only give it four stars because I could not be present and mindful with it all the time. It deserves a second reading and all those five star reviews.
I get it even though I was a bit lost at times in the land of the history of love.

***ALL SPOILERS HIDDEN***

How to sum up The History of Love? Jigsaw puzzle in book form, maybe. For a book only just over 250 pages, it's 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. 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.

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 (although 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's 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 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, however, when the lack of organization is in the actual narrative; this book contains two stories in one, and at times that's as confusing as it sounds (two characters with the same first name do not help matters). 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. Too much is implied or communicated in riddles, particularly during Leo’s narration. At the end of the book, it’s revealed that another friend of Leo’s, Boris, who figures prominently throughout, has actually been dead for decades.

Young Alma’s attempt to play matchmaker for her mother fizzles out disappointingly quickly, when this plot thread seemed to show great initial promise. Additionally, the sad-sack mother character gets short shrift and is the least developed of all the characters. This cutesy matchmaker angle could have been left out altogether, with no detriment to the overall story.

Unfortunately, there’s no drama or intensity in the denouement, and there really should be, given everything leading up to that point. The story starts off strongly, but ends on a limp, somewhat nebulous note. In short, there’s too much going on. It’s a mish-mash of plot lines seemingly connected but not clearly enough to be understood easily on the first reading, just too much stubbornly stuffed into one story. This is a book that begs to be read more than once, not so much because it’s so good but because it’s so convoluted.

Still, there’s no denying this is engrossing, that it pulls on heart strings from start to finish, and that Krauss’s writing style is striking: “[...]the rustle of clothes being dropped to the floor, of lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking under the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.” It’s that kind of writing, along with winning characters, genuine emotion, and well-written humor, that does make this a book worth reading (though perhaps with a notebook in hand for taking notes).

Prima di cominciare la lettura sono andata a leggere il retro della copertina per sapere chi fosse e cosa avesse scritto Nicole Krauss. Per me una scrittrice sconosciuta. Leggo che ha scritto due romanzi, compreso quello di cui sto parlando.
Comincio a leggere e mentre procedo penso: “questo libro me ne ricorda un altro già letto!”, ma non riesco a focalizzare, finchè ho avuto l’illuminazione: Jonathan Safran Foer! Di lui ho letto “ogni cosa è illuminata” e, seppur lo stile di scrittura di Safran Foer sia davvero particolare, c’è un qualcosa che collega questi due scrittori. Mi metto a fare ricerche in internet e scopro che Nicole Kraus è la moglie di Jonathan Safran Foer. Spiegato l’arcano.
La somiglianza con Safran Foer la trovo nei protagonisti, ebrei dell’Europa dell’Est costretti a fuggire a causa delle persecuzioni naziste, personaggi “border line”; la trovo nelle tematiche del ricordo, dell’amore genitori e figli; la trovo nell’atmosfera magica che avvolge le storie dei protagonisti.
Passando a parlare della lettura e di quanto il libro mi ha trasmesso, posso dire che fino a circa tre quarti non ci capivo nulla; questo perché sono narrate storie parallele di personaggi diversi, che fino ad un certo punto non hanno nulla in comune, poi, man mano che si va avanti, vengono alla luce i collegamenti, che sono comunque vaghi, quasi tirati per i capelli, per cui il lettore, o meglio la lettrice, cioè io, trova difficoltà a seguire cercando di capire magari i collegamenti temporali dei fatti. Insomma, in poche parole, fino ad almeno tre quarti il libro non mi ha preso.
Poi si arriva al finale, e lì sono stata irretita dalla storia, sono stata presa nel vortice delle emozioni, senza più stare a guardare se la storia filava –e ora a mente fredda, mi pare che qualche scollegamento ci sia-. Il finale ha riscattato l’intero libro.
La storia dell’amore: amore dei figli per un padre morto che ha lasciato un enorme vuoto nel cuore; l’amore di una donna per il marito morto che non potrà essere sostituito da nessun altro uomo; l’amore di un padre per un figlio la cui esistenza è stata scoperta tardi, ma che è al centro dei suoi pensieri; il primo amore di una quindicenne per un coetaneo, amore che fa paura e attrae al contempo; l’amore di un giovane ebreo polacco per la dolce Alma, amore che durerà tutta la vita. Tante storie, tutte imperniate su questo sentimento che riempie la vita.
La Krauss ha una scrittura molto piacevole, delicata, che fa vibrare il cuore: “Nemmeno ora esistono tutti i sentimenti possibili. Ci sono ancora quelli che stanno oltre la nostra capacità e la nostra immaginazione. Talvolta, quando si sente un brano musicale appena composto, o si osserva un nuovo quadro, o quando accade qualcosa che era impossibile prevedere, immaginare, o descrivere, un nuovo sentimento entra nel mondo. E allora, per la milionesima volta nella storia dei sentimenti, il cuore si erge ad assorbirne l’impatto”.
Sono incerta tra tre o quattro stelle. Le tre stelle le metterei perché, come ho detto sopra, per tre quarti il romanzo non mi ha preso, solo il finale mi ha coinvolto. Diciamo che sono tre stelle e mezzo.

The Book Of Love

In 1958, a doo-wop group called the Monotones had a hit with their song "The Book of Love" which included lyrics such as the following:

"Tell me, tell me, tell me

Oh who wrote the book of love

I've got to know the answer

Was it someone from above

Oh I wonder, wonder who ..

Who wrote the Book of Love."

Niclole Kraus's novel "The History of Love" (2005) is about the tortured fate of a fictitious novel of that name. Her book, and the novel enraveled within it, remind me of the Monotone's wonderful song. The book and the doo-wop song celebrate the mystery of love, its joy and sorrow, and its power to move people at whatever stages of their lives. Unlike the Monotone's song, however, the book is difficult to follow in places, marred by artificiality in the plot, and by too great a sense of cleverness. For all that, I found it moving.

The book is set in contemporary New York City and is related in several voices, the chief of which belongs to 80 year-old Leo Gursky. Gursky is a Holocaust survivor who escaped to the United States where he worked as a locksmith. As a young man in Poland, Leo fell in love with a young woman who emigrated to the United States before he did, bore Leo's child, but married someone else. For the rest of his life, Leo retained his youthful, failed love and never was interested in another woman. Before he left Poland, he had written a lengthy manuscript based upon his relationship.

The other chief character in the book, is a 14-15 year old girl, Alma. Alma's father died when she was 7 and her mother, who works as a translator and reads prolifically, has never become interested in another man, to Alma's regret. Alma has a younger brother, nicknamed "Bird" who fantasizes that he may be on of the 36 righteous individuals of the Talmud, or, perhaps, the Jewish Messiah. Alma too is in love, with a Russian emigre of about her own age named Mischa.

Another character in the book is a quiet young intellectual, Zvi Litvinoff, who also escapes Poland at the time of the Nazis and settles in Chile. He woos and wins a woman named Rosa who writes an introduction to an obscure novel that Litvinoff had earlier published in Spanish under his own name.

The novel takes and tries to combine these three seemingly disparate groups of characters and their passions with the focal point the mysterious book "The History of Love." While the story line is convoluted, feelings are presented with conviction. In particular, Leo Gursky, with his lifelong unrequited passion, is convincingly portrayed as are the scenes and haunts of an aged Jewish man in New York City -- the streets, parks, apartments, taxicabs, small cafe's and coffeshops, illnesses, and attempts to stay alive. The power of young love is shown in Leo's life and, in a less convincing way, in the lives of the other chaaracters, including Alma's mother, Alma herself, Zvi Litvinoff, and many lesser characters. Much of Krauss' writing is lyrical and poetic while other sections, particularly involving Alma and Bird, fall flat. Some of the mannerisms Krauss gives her characters, the repeated use of the interjection "and yet" by Gursky for example, become annoying and repetitive rather quickly. But the book sings, if with a limp in places, of human love and its power over the human spirit.

Here are more lyrics from the Monotones' song that this book brought to mind.

"Chapter One says to love her

You love her with all your heart

Chapter Two you tell her your'e

Never, never, never going to part

In Chapter Three remember the meaning of romance

In Chapter Four you break up

But you give her just one more chance

Oh I wonder wonder who ...

Who wrote the book of love."

Krauss' "History of Love" brought to my mind, the melody and fresh feeling of love -- captured even more fully in a doo-wop song from the 1950s.

Robin Friedman

This book made me smile from beginning to end. Especially the character of Leo Gursky. For him alone I would give this book 5 stars. And yet..... there was so much more.

I finished reading "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss a few days ago. Here's a synopsis:

"An unlikely and unforgettable hero, Leo Gursky is a survivor -- of war, of love, and of loneliness. A retired locksmith, Leo does his best to get by. He measures the passage of days by the nightly arrival of the delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant and has arranged a code with his upstairs neighbor: Three taps on the radiator means, "ARE YOU ALIVE?, two means YES, one NO." But it wasn't always so. Sixty years earlier, before he fled Poland for New York, Leo met a girl named Alma and fell in love. He wrote a book and named the character in it after his beloved. Years passed, lives changed, and unbeknownst to Leo, the book survived. And it provides Leo -- in the eighth decade of his life -- with a link to the son he's never known. How this long-lost book makes an extraordinary reappearance and connects the lives of disparate characters is only one of the small miracles The History of Love offers its readers." - from bn.com

My thought at the end of the book was - The ending brought the book up from good to very good. Still not great.

I wanted to love this book. I really did. I had loved the excerpt I'd read in the New Yorker, and I was expecting to love the whole thing. I particularly loved the characters she created: Leo Gursky - who was so vivid, and interesting, with such a distinct voice. Alma Singer - a fourteen year old girl in a novel I could actually relate to for once. Smart, but not annoyingly/precociously so. Body issues, but not to the point where she felt sorry for herself as a person. Bird - my only complaintis that I feel like he got short shrift. He's so interesting, I think he deserved a novel of his own. He was reduced to a plot device, and that really irritated me, because I liked him so much. To have his interest in his faith exist only to serve Alma's search was downright criminal.(and why is his religious fervence treated like an illness instad of as something that can actually help him through his father's death? Just curious...)

What bothered me was that Krauss seemed to be trying too hard to be "experiemental." (whatever that means anymore...) What I loved about Man Walks Into a Room, her first novel, was its language and its directness. How it told a story. But for everything I enjoyed about this book, there were two that either annoyed me or confused me.

There are some beautiful poignant passages in this book - about lost/new love, about identity, about growing older...but then there's a page of charts for no real reason. Alma tells her story in list form. There are pages with only one or two sentences on them (some successful, some not). I dont' feel like any of these "tricks" suited the story she was trying to tell. It didn't feel like that's the way the story needed to be told - also, this didn't feel like Krauss' voice to me. It felt as if she were doing an impression...or at the very least, she was a ventriloquist speaking through a dummy. I missed her voice.

I wanted to hear Nicole Krauss speak...I ended up hearing who she thought we wanted to hear. It's not the same thing.

It seems that I have gotten so out of step lately that I’m even unable to keep up with the GR bandwagon. Apparently right now is the time for me to play questionable suckers’ games involving feats of mad catch-up and chasing other people’s spouses. Sure, it looks like a good plan on paper and I got Foer completely covered, but there seems to be no future in it beyond that. I don’t recall Bolaño, Ellroy, or Coetzee having significant others in the literary game. Perhaps Ellroy did a couple of wives ago (the coozehound), but I’m not sure. Does Coetzee even share his bed with anyone? For some reason I always featured him as the Chuck Norris of literary fiction – while the rest of us are sleeping he just stares at the wall and waits.

Probably everyone else knows this already and I was the last guy to get the memo, but Nicole Krauss is the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer and also a tremendous talent in her own right. My understanding is that she comes from a poetry background. This does not surprise me, as her prose is a thing of fractured beauty. Her characters are written with that special nuance that makes them hop off of the pages and walk around the room. I would love to encounter Leo Gursky and sit beside him on a park bench as he tells me whatever he is in the mood to speak about. Alma, Bird, and Bruno are also lovingly depicted characters as well.

There is some Post Modern trickery afoot in this tale, but not so much that it seems glaringly obvious or annoying for the most part. A book called ‘The History of Love’ figures prominently in this book. I’m a total sucker for any story involving mysterious, lost books or writers. It kind of brings me back to that magical place where I first discovered the joy of reading and literature outside of a compulsory classroom setting and felt like I could save the world if I could just get everyone as excited as I was at the time. I am curious as to why Krauss wrote all of the chapters narrated by Alma as numbered lists. It didn’t necessarily detract from my enjoyment of those chapters, but I just found it to be an odd stylistic choice.

Throughout the first two-hundred pages of this book I knew that it was going to be a five-star book. Two hours after finishing it I’m not so sure, although there are many things that I’m still pondering. Here are a couple of issues that I had:

1) Bruno wasn’t real???

I did a total “WTF?!” on this one at the time. How can a prominent character who is the perfect foil for Leo not really exist beyond 1941? That’s just wrong.

I’m starting to come to peace with this plot point two hours later, however, as I’m thinking that Leo may have reencountered Bruno within the slightly skewed timeline of the story shortly after learning that Alma Mereminski, the love of his life, had recently passed away. It seems that she was often the only thing that he had to live for and once he discovered that she was gone he needed a stand in.

2) What about Charlotte?

A main plotline had to do with fifteen year old Alma Singer trying to find happiness for her mother, Charlotte. Alma and Bird’s father, David, had passed away seven years before and their mother had remained in a state of grieving for her one true love. Alma was on a mission to bring happiness to her mother for most of the book, but then she seems to get sidetracked and that story thread dies on the vine. The same could be said about young Alma’s relationship with Misha as well.

Hmm…is this possibly the wisdom that Krauss was wanting to pass along to readers, that love is often a very messy affair and the loose ends will most likely never be all tied up nicely? Just when you think that you have that problem concerning the ugly spirit of loneliness all sewn up something happens such as death or a break-up that pulls the rug out from under you and the only solace is to hold onto that moment of connectedness (no matter if it lasted two weeks or fifty years) and cherish the fact that you had that person in your life at the exact moment that you needed them.

Damn you, Nicole Krauss, you’re going to make me obsess about your book for another couple of weeks, aren’t you?

Great enjoyable book. Seth is right. To a small extent it deals with the Holocaust, but to a much larger extent it deals with some of the after effects of the Holocaust specifically and genocide in general. It was recommended to me by a friend who is a clinical psychologist with an expertise in the transmission of trauma to future generations. Well written.
She wrote one book before this, "Man Walks Into A Room" and one since, "The Great House." I plan on reading both.