Formed like a grand and colorful impressionist painting, this story of love comes together in ornate jigsaw puzzle pieces—throbbing with old-world Jewish heart, humor, and soul. The writing seems effortless, yet as I writer, I know the skill required. There is nothing unnecessary in the text, yet it is packed: the language, the narrative details, the nuances of personality. I cried convulsively at the end. I’m in awe.

Since I live near where the book ends, for all the people who have read The History of Love, I'm sharing visuals:

‘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.’

Simply put, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is a deluge of beauty and emotions that will certainly burst through even the strongest levees of hearts. This book is like a warm blanket and cup of tea on a cold, rainy day when you are emotionally exhausted. It is an ode to the human spirit, the will to live, love, survive, and create, even when beleaguered by the horrors of war and chased down by the ticking of time towards inevitable death. The multiple storylines work as commentary upon each other, asking questions on the meaning of authenticity or simply shattered lives seeking solace or a purpose as they try to find ways to love themselves and one another. Spanning decades and spiraling between three primary narratives, this is an emotional epic, an immigrant story, a somber bildungsroman and a metafiction feast that addresses fears of existence while threading hearts and lives together around a single, little-known novel that forever alters each character. And it will most likely change you as well, dear reader.

‘Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.’

Seriously, this book will make you weep. Not just like a few tears, I’m talking I closed the final page full-on, soul cleansing, ugly crying pausing only to laugh at myself and then launch back into the tears. Krauss captures emotional exhaustion and impalpable sadness really well, best embodied in the scenes of the young girl trying to make sense of the world as grief leaves everything feeling bruised around her after the early death of her father. The novel centers on Leo Gursky, a lonely Polish octogenarian living in a small apartment in New York as he awaits his final breath, his only friend being another Polish immigrant who was a childhood friend and now lives above him. He spends each day trying ‘to make a point of being seen,’ not wanting to die on a day nobody had viewed him. It also follows the story of 14 year old Alma Singer as she hunts down the truth about a mysterious novel her mother is translation while also looking for a love interest for said mother. Additionally, we learn the life of that novel’s author, or is he really?

‘A kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination.’

There is a unique flair to each narrative. Leo is written in first person and sways between memory and present, loosely flowing from one to the other. While the rhetorical quirk to add ‘And yet.’ as a declarative after statements gets a bit overused, it is still charming and taps the hopeless-yet-hopeful tone that permeates his sections. The Alma sections, written in quick vignettes, has a nearly Wes Anderson appeal to them with her quirky love of outdoor survival facts and collecting anything that relates to her late father. For the Polish writer Zvi Litvinoff, these sections are told like a sly biography, while the sections about Alma’s brother, Bird, that appear at the end of the novel are written as heart wrenching diary entries as he tries to ‘be normal’ and grapples with his belief of being the Messiah and his love of Jewish tradition. These narratives weave together to become something far greater than the sum of their parts as another patchwork in the history of love, and the reader is keenly aware each has something to do with the other narratives, but even when they eventually conjoin as the connections become apparent, each union sheds light on more truths and beauty that you could ever image.

‘The boy became a man who became invisible. In this way he escaped death.’

Survival is a major theme here and many of the ways this is done is through literature. ‘The truth is a thing I invented so I could live,’ Leo says, and he spends a great deal of the novel writing a book, Words for Everything to push aside his loneliness, tell his truths and ‘because an undescribed world was too lonely.’ As a youth he also wrote, struggling to find a blend between books that were too realistic or overly made-up, struggling to create a perfect world of words to impress the girl of his dreams, a world of words they could live in together. But, alas, they are separated by an ocean and a war when she is able to flee and he must stay behind to survive, a Jew in occupied Poland. This is paralleled with Litvinoff who makes his way to Chile and finds love, a love that wishes to live in his world of words and pushes him to publish a novel, a novel of tenebrous mystery but full of beauty to connect each character.

There is a passage that follows the single copy of the in-novel novel also titled The History of Love from publication, to bookstore shelves, returned to a warehouse, sold to a used book dealer and finally into the hands of Alma’s father. Then gifted to Alma’s mother when the two first meet. It is a scene sure to capture the heart of even a passing hobbyist bibliophile as the origin story for how Alma was named for the many Almas in the novel, something that certainly tugged my heartstrings as the proud father of a little girl I named from a childhood favorite novel. The way Krauss so perfectly examines how literature can uphold a weary heart and leave a lasting mark to glow inside us is just one of many reasons I encourage you to dive into this short novel.

These characters try to prolong life in the words on a page, or to protect a story ‘so that he could buy a little more time.’ When working on his novel, Leo says ‘at times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same,’ believing this act of creation is also keeping him alive. This also gets into the metafictional aspects of the novel, as the reader will soon learn the origins of The History of Love and the mysterious patron asking for an English translation of it are a much more complicated and tragic affair than initially thought, and the ‘final chapter’ appears in many layered forms in this book.

‘She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.’


Learning to live with difficult truths is central to each character, each having experienced a great loss. Or, as Krauss writes they ‘learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.’ There is the loss of love, the loss of one’s country, the loss of a parent, the loss of innocence, and the great loss of time and what might have been. Leo must watch his son grow up never knowing who his real father is, making for some of the most tenderly sad moments in the book as Leo spins Dylan and Beatles records hoping to catch the music of the day his son might enjoy. ‘Perhaps that is what it means to be a father —to teach your child to live without you,’ he ponders, ‘if so, no one was a greater father than I.’ While Leo passes towards the end of life without his son, Alma passes into maturity without a father. A loss that is felt in every aspect of her life and self-confidence. Her near-romance falters, her family is in a state of melancholy, her Uncle’s marriage is falling apart, her brother is the local oddball, nothing seems to be going well and her attempts to find a lover for her grieving mother becomes an obsession to discover the origins of Alma if only to give herself a purpose.

‘It’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway around the world, only this was the opposite of disaster.’

This quest becomes an act of love that ripples far beyond her. Similarly, Leo recounts how he was spared death when hiding in hay from Nazis as the German soldiers were to preoccupied over one’s wife accusing him of infidelity to properly inspect the barn. ‘By accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace,’ he contemplates of the soldier’s wife, ‘and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.’ Krauss deftly recreates this sort of butterfly effect through the experimental nature of her novel, which I felt manages to avoid feeling gimmicky by passing tremendous emotional weight and resonance through each stitching as the disparate elements are pulled together to the absolutely heartbreaking and life affirming conclusion. The two taps that meant ‘I’m alive’ when Leo knocks on his radiator each night return in one of the most touching scenes I’ve ever read that ties a brilliant emotive bow to the end of the book. Discovering Bruno was a product of his imagination all along was also a massive kick right to the heart. It was well earned but I’m glad it was only softly mentioned and brushed aside quickly, being just another element of the beauty rather than being relied upon as a twist to uphold the ending.. Krauss knows how to end on a high note and not linger.

This is a talent Krauss has, as there are many beautiful moments that she doesn’t dwell on and instead allows to resonate inside you as you sort through them. When the Uncle tries to explain his fraught relationship, for example, he begins explaining a painting he loves before losing the thread of what he was getting at. We watch him go from an abstract connection from the heart into a cerebral examination of the painting only to find, from that perspective, the initial emotional connection is ineffable. I also find it moving in a way that can’t be contained by words how the written love for Alma survives not only decades but also translation and medium, going from ink and paper in Yiddish to being published in Spanish and later digitized on a computer when being translated again into English. The beauty of these moments is like a butterflies wings, gorgeous but turns to dust if you try to touch them or cage them into explanation.

‘An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.’

When a good friend said this was a favorite book last summer, I knew I had to read it. It seemed destined to work for me, especially as the product of Polish immigrants and a fan of all the authors name dropped throughout the book (Bruno Schulz and Nicanor Parra for instance) but I still didn’t expect it to hit me this hard. It is a heavy book with a somber tone that really seeps in as you read it and pulls you into the character's respective griefs. But it is also quite funny at times. Most importantly, Krauss pulls it all off. War is tragic, and this was difficult to read as we are all watching another if only in our news feeds and this book is a reminder that even the survivor’s lives are often scattered across the earth like fragments from a blast. Thankfully we have literature to find each other, to have voices heard, to connect, to share, and to love. And for that I will always be thankful for literature. I could rave about this book all day and it’s multi-layered goodness, but I’ve already taken up too much of your time and you should just pick this up and read it.

5/5

‘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.’

Being Moved

If you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer. I mean no disparagement by saying that nobody does Holocaust survivor-tragedy better than she. The old man in the empty Manhattan apartment whose pregnant Polish sweetheart had left him years ago for America, and whose closest contact with his son is at the son's wake is tragedy with punch. As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relationship with yet another survivor-figure who is obsessed with the work of an obscure South American poet (he a betrayer-survivor). Identities blur and flow into one another until the reveal becomes complete. The way human beings deal with chance, particularly the randomness of death, and the role of the long-term tragedy of chance itself become pitiable. With her remarkable skill, Krauss entraps (I have no better word) the reader into her emotional universe. Her oeuvre is emotion and as one of her characters says, "The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible." She does a good line in making much that is invisible if not entirely clear then at least something to be considered seriously, savoured like a good kosher meal.

5★
The many and varied threads of this story are woven around a book called A History of Love and lead eventually to a complicated, satisfying conclusion. Not a happily-ever-after ending, but one that answered the important questions for me.

Leo Gursky is an old Jewish immigrant living alone in New York. He reminisces about his childhood in Poland where he wrote countless stories, and he now has a manuscript in a box in his oven. He remembers the last time he saw his mother, when she’d sent him into the woods to escape the Nazis. His childhood sweetheart had already migrated to America, and so he followed, thinking he’d find her. Her name was Alma.

But now, who cares whether he lives or dies? He carries a note that says:

n  "MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION."n

He has a horror of ending up dead for days before someone discovers the smell, as has happened in his building.

n  “I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven . . . All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.”n

He describes how he’s aged, thinking it may be why people avoid him.

n  “The year of my Bar Mitzvah I was visited by a plague of acne that stayed for four years. But still I continued to hope. As soon as the acne cleared my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face. My ears, pleased with the new attention they now enjoyed, seemed to strain farther into the spotlight. My eyelids drooped—some muscle tension had to give to support the struggle of the ears—and my eyebrows took on a life of their own, for a brief period achieving all anyone could have hoped for them, and then surpassing those hopes and approaching Neanderthal.”n

Alma Singer is a 14-year-old Jewish schoolgirl who lives in New York with her mother and brother after her father’s died. Her parents named her after a character in the book they both loved, “The History of Love. Alma has dreams of making her mother happy again by finding her a new husband. Her younger brother, Bird, is a strange boy who thinks he may be one of God’s special holy people and goes around performing odd religious acts. The kids become interested in a book Alma’s mother gives her by a palaeontologist. Krauss’s explanation is perfect.

n  “Bird asked what a palaeontologist 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 this scraps, that would be like being a palaeontologist. The only difference is that palaeontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life.”n

Then there’s Zvi Litvinoff, a Polish refugee in Chile who becomes famous after publishing a book, at his wife Rosa’s insistence, called “The History of Love”, a book of many stories, all of which feature a girl named Alma.

And each of the threads in this book features an Alma.

Beautifully done.

"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.

Foi a primeira vez que li Nicole Krauss e gostei imenso, muito mesmo, da experiência. O seu estilo é lindíssimo, lírico, introspetivo, com passagens que me deixaram com uma vontade louca de as sublinhar (só não o fiz porque o livro veio da biblioteca) e com duas das personagens mais enternecedoras e comoventes com que lidei nos últimos tempos, não fossem elas um velhote (Leo) e uma criança (Alma). Leo é, sem qualquer tipo de dúvida, alguém de quem me condoí como poucas vezes o fiz com uma pessoa ficcionada. O amor que, mesmo já velho, ainda devota à mulher da sua vida, a sua inocência e credulidade, a sua invisibilidade voluntária perante alguém que é sangue do seu sangue e os gestos carregadinhos de ternura que tem para com outra personagem nas derradeiras páginas da obra, tudo isto compõe alguém que eu não esqueço, nem quero esquecer. De Alma recordarei os esforços hercúleos de uma menina adolescente que carrega nos ombros a tristeza de uma família órfã de pai e de marido. Às outras personagens dei e continuo a dar um espaço bem mais secundário, mas uma delas manter-se-á comigo como sendo aquela que me reservou a surpresa “mais surpreendente” do final do livro.

Opinião completa em:
https://osabordosmeuslivros.blogspot....

NOTA - 09/10

Such a gorgeous piece of literary fiction. Full of interesting characters and fascinating story lines. And to top it off, an ending so poignant and perfect. The History of Love was a tremendously powerful book and one I'll never forget it. Absolutely beautiful.

Thank you to the lovely, anonymous man in the Port Credit Starbucks who handed me the napkins, without a word, as I finished this up not an hour ago with tears filling my eyes.

It was a perfect moment perfectly matched to this pretty much perfect book.
______________________

Read this book if:
1) you liked Incredibly Loud Extremely Close, Everything is Illuminated and/or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
2) you like fictional, character-driven stories of Holocaust survivors e.g., The Book Thief or Fugitive Pieces to name just two
3) you're ok with some modest post-mod construction and precocious teen narrators/central characters
4) you hate [eta: traditional, boy-meets-girl/happily-ever-after] love stories because they trivialize the importance of love.

This book is about love. And identity. And hope. And friendship. It is beautiful and poignant. It will shortly be read by every friend I have who has any sense in their heads.

If you want to read a real review, see this one or this one. And thank you, Ian Graye, for bringing this novel to my attention with yours.

One of the most beautiful and saddest “experimental” love stories I’ve ever read.

I’ve had this novel on my TBR since January 2014, a very long time. The main reason it stayed there was the author’s ex-husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. I did not enjoy his book Everything is Illuminated and I wrongly presumed that I will not like History of Love either. A stupid idea, I know, but from the description it felt similar. Both are Jewish authors writing a book with multiple plot lines and the blurb also reminded me of Foer’s strangeness. Glad I finally got the courage to read this beauty.
I have no idea how to review this book. I also have no time at all to think so, again, it will be a short one.

There are a two main narrative voices and two episodic one. Leo Gurski, my favourite character is an old sad man of Polish origin living in NY. He once loved a woman named Alma and wrote a book about her which was lost in the war. Or was it? Alma is a little girl who lost her father to a disease and her mother to grief (still alive but barely). She is desperately trying to make her mother feel better. One day the mother receives a request to translate in English her favourite book which was a gift from her dead husband and which gave Alma her name. As you might have already figured out, there is a connection between the two characters, namely the book called The History of Love.

I loved the structure of the novel, the multiple plot lines, the characters, the snippets from History of Love inserted in the novel. The characters live in the past, back when there was no loss, which makes them incapable to also live in the present. I think the name, History is well chosen, taking that in consideration. History of loss may be an even better title, as another reviewer wrote.

That’s all my sleep deprived brain can come up with. Read this novel, is beautiful.

5 +++ stars

I loved this book, but somehow words fail me in explaining why or even what the book is about! I’ve been pondering why and think it’s because instead of reading about the lives of the people who populate the book, Krauss gives you an experience of their lives. We meet several people from different generations, areas of the world and different walks of life. We learn early on that their lives are somehow entwined and connected by a love of writing and a particular book, The History of Love, written by one of the main characters as a young man in Poland during WWII. We meet them all in contemporary times and sense that somehow they will meet, although we’re not sure if, how or when. This book which is about the totality of life – love, loss, life and death - left me with tears in my eyes and a wonderful feeling of satisfaction.

I’m so glad I read this in print, because it is a beautifully designed book. Krauss writes from the point of view of four of the main characters and the chapters devoted to each are written in a different style and format. I am also glad to see that The History of Love is available in audio – I want to experience it again and I think that might be a perfect way!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

“The History of Love” is a heartfelt love story. The story tells the unwavering love of an octogenarian for his childhood sweetheart, and the aching love of a young girl for her lonely mother. It’s a story of devotion.

The novel opens with Leo Gursky, the octogenarian protagonist, living alone in a New York City apartment, worried that he’ll die and no one will find him for days, or that he will die unnoticed. He intentionally makes a memorable scene with all humans with whom he comes in contact. Within the first few pages of the novel, I was laughing out loud. Leo is a hoot. What could be a maudlin tale is sprinkled with humor at the human condition.

Leo has survived the Nazis. He’s survived the wilderness. What he hasn’t survived is his first love, Alma. He and Alma grew up together in Poland. As a dreamy young man, Leo writes “The History of Love” as a tribute to his love for Alma. Unfortunately for Leo, Alma’s family sends her to the USA from Poland when she is 18 and the family feels threatened by the potential invasion of Germany. Leo pines for Alma for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, fourteen year-old Alma, who was named after the Alma in Leo’s novel “The History of Love” finds herself responsible for her younger brother, Bird, after her father accidently dies and leaves her mother bereaved. Alma feels a deep sense of loss for her father, and feels worried for her mother. Bird’s character helps makes the story witty and endearing. Bird is trying to find his place in the world, and he’s a bit eccentric. Alma has her own life to worry about as well, as a girl who is changing from childhood to womanhood. Alma’s coming-of-age scenes are amusing as well. All the characters take part in making this an enjoyable and fun read, but Bird’s innocence adds a special touch.

This is a beautiful story of a novel within a novel of the same name. All the characters are realistic and funny. It’s touching and moving. Thank you GR friend Tania for recommending it. I highly recommend it!

I am a careless reader; I don’t pick up on things and I read in a kind of fog. It’s only when I read something for a second time that I can really appreciate a writer’s craft and skill. So it is with The History of Love; among other things it’s a mystery, and I was thoroughly confused at first. But when the mystery was revealed I could only marvel at the way Krauss put this story together.

Reading it the second time was a totally different experience – I knew what was going to happen, and yet … (which you could say is the book’s theme) and yet … I didn’t, because I didn’t realize until then how much I had missed the first time, and how cleverly the clues were hidden.

It is almost impossible to summarize without making the plot sound prosaic or twisted, which it absolutely is not; and yet ... to say anything about it is really to say too much so, spoiler alert, maybe stop right here if you have yet to read it, though I am not going to reveal everything.

There are three significant and contrasting voices in this story – the wonderfully sardonic and self-aware Leo Gursky, nearing the end of his life in New York, who 60 years earlier in Poland had written something he called The History of Love for Alma, the love of his life.
Then there is Alma Singer (named after Alma in the book), a young girl also living in NY, who is seen mainly through her diary-like observations as she tries to piece together a mystery surrounding The History of Love while trying to find a date for her widowed mother.
And finally, the story of Leo’s one-time friend Zvi Litvinoff, who like Leo, escaped from Poland just before the Holocaust but ended up in Chile, though after the war, each thinks the other didn’t survive; Zvi’s story is told from the viewpoint of an omniscient biographer-like third person.
But there is a fourth – Alma Singer’s younger brother, nicknamed “Bird”, who seems simply a confused and misinformed eleven-year-old, almost incidental to Alma’s story. And yet ... it is through Bird that everything comes together.

The History of Love is also the story of several – many – loves: Leo’s for Alma, for Isaac the son he never knew, and for his friend Bruno; Zvi’s love for his wife Rosa; Alma Singer’s and her mother Charlotte’s love for Alma’s father who had died some seven years earlier. The History of Love had been her father’s favourite book, it was written by Zvi in Spanish, but it isn’t the one that Leo wrote ... and yet, it is ...
Charlotte had mentioned Zvi’s book in passing, in a translation of poems she published. Subsequently she received a mysterious request from someone named Jacob to translate it into English - but for his eyes only, not for publication - and yet ... a copy of that translation ends up in Leo’s hands.

It is like magical realism, and yet ... not; because there is a reason for everything; there are in fact “Words for Everything”, the title Leo gives to his second heartfelt work which he writes, not for publication but for his son Isaac. (When Leo finally made it to New York after WW2, Alma was already married with a child that Leo never knew he had fathered. Out of love for Alma, Leo walks out of their lives). Words for Everything is Leo’s way of letting Isaac, who became a celebrated writer himself, know of his love. Tragically, Isaac died of a heart attack before they could meet, so Leo never knew whether Isaac even read it.
But then the work appears in a literary magazine under Isaac’s name, posthumously; once again Leo seems to have been denied credit for his work. Was it plagiarism? ... and yet ... when Leo realizes that it means Isaac must have read the manuscript, his heart almost bursts.

Leo is blessed with a remarkable imagination that inspired his writing, but also, it emerges, cursed with the ability to re-invent the inconvenient parts of his history. So at the end of the book, he admits that Bruno was his invented friend, the real Bruno had died in 1941 (which for me made the early descriptions of his life in NY unbearably sad), and that the same year, Alma had told him that she could never love him the way he loved her ... and yet ... there is a wonderful resolution to it all, when Krauss finally brings Leo and Alma Singer together.

I could say much more, < sniff >, < wipes tears from eyes >, but I think this is enough for me to be able to remember The History of Love for a long, long time.