Krauss calls this book the history of love but it struck me as being more a history of loss. It is the story of a displaced person, an elderly man drowning in urban isolation, cut off from his only son and deprived even of authorship of his own words. He is a man who fears that he is invisible and whose only friend is in fact imaginary. Krauss has created an unforgettable character in Leo Gursky. I could have done without some of the smoke and mirrors she felt she needed to create around Leo's story but I am very glad to have read it.

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

Leopold Gursky, Holocaust survivor, is a lonely old man who dreams of his long-lost love Alma Mereminski and survives each day with the desire to just be noticed by someone. He has one single soul he can call a friend in this world, Bruno, his “old faithful”. Alma Singer is a fourteen year old girl who lost her father and whose heart aches for the mother that can barely get out of bed and make it to the next day - "My mother is lonely even when we’re around her". Alma and her brother, Bird, have each other, but Alma needs her mother to be happy and live in this world once again, not simply by getting by with just her memories. Then comes the day when Alma’s mother is asked to translate a book called "The History of Love" – the very same book that Alma’s father gave to her mother all those years ago and the one that provided the inspiration behind Alma’s own name. Alma begins a quest to find a partner for her mother and becomes involved in researching the background of this book. We also meet Zvi Litvinoff, a Polish refugee living in South America. Litvinoff, too, suffers from his own private sorrow and grief, but is the fortunate recipient of loyalty and love from a woman named Rosa. Litvinoff has achieved some fame in his life with the publication of his book, "The History of Love". There it is again, that book… "The History of Love."

I thought this book was brilliantly written. There is a puzzle to solve here and we are only given snippets of the answers a little at a time. I must say that you have to be ready to devote your full attention to this book – so choose a time when you can do just that! I am very glad I read this after the holiday season; otherwise I admit that I may have gotten lost through the intricate weaving of the threads of this story. However, if you can devote your time and truly focus, the payoff is well worth it!

Krauss’s novel exudes such a feeling of loneliness and loss. My heart ached for Leo Gursky and young Alma Singer. There are moments of humor, however, when Leo exerts such efforts to get himself noticed. One scene had me laughing to myself and I won’t soon get that one out of my head! Of course, love is a central theme in this book - love for a soul-mate, love for a mother, love for a son, love for a father, and love for the friend that helps you get through each day. The writing is exquisite and often quite lyrical. After reading this, it struck me that one cannot simply survive on memories alone, no matter how precious those memories may be. Trying to sustain oneself with the past keeps us from really living in the present. I will not soon forget The History of Love.

"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. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them."

I need to cut the crap with my preconceptions. Although I almost unfailingly launch into a new novel with great enthusiasm like a kid on Christmas morning, anxious to discover what hidden treasure awaits, for some reason I held out little hope for Mrs. Foer’s book about a book about love. Maybe it’s because books about books about love aren’t usually my thing? Maybe it’s because I read her husband’s bestseller last year and was less than impressed? Maybe it’s because I had heard somewhere that they wrote their books together (oh, how adorable!), bouncing ideas off one another and giving each other high fives, so naturally I assumed that if Mr. Foer’s book was gimmicky (which it is), then The History of Love would surely be a major eye-roller as well, right?

Wrong.

Whatever the reason, I was clearly out of line, and for that I owe Nicole a huge apology. In this book she weaves three intersecting storylines all under a cloud of intriguing ambiguity, so even though it is understood that the stories are related, it isn’t exactly clear how until about two-thirds of the way through. And as the stories of Leopold Gursky, Alma Singer, and Zvi Litvinoff are told to us, they leave an imprint on us even before we learn for sure who they are.

The History of Love is a gorgeous novel with gorgeous characters who do what characters do best: they love and they lose, they struggle and they fail, and if lucky they learn how to pick up the pieces and survive. For them, survival is not a destination but a journey. There’s no magic cure and there’s no end-all. But taken one day at a time, it is possible to live a life worth living. Krauss reminds us that all we really want is to remain visible—to be known, to be loved, and to be remembered by those who knew and loved us.

I won a copy of this book through World Book Night, a program begun in the UK last year to spread the love of reading. That program has now arrived in the US, and even though I technically shouldn’t have qualified for receiving a copy of this—WBN books are supposed to have been given only to “light” readers in the hopes that they become “moderate” readers—I will make sure that it will have been worth their while by spreading my love for this book about a book about love.

The History of Love is one of those spider-web books that reviewers unintentionally tear to pieces in the act of clearing a path for readers. I promise to move delicately, but beware helpful explanations: No one must rob you of the chance to experience Nicole Krauss's new novel in all its beautiful confusion. The New Yorker ran an excerpt last year that was funny and touching but gave little sense of the whole novel's complexity. Though it's a relatively short book (some pages contain only a sentence or two), The History of Love involves several narrators and moves back and forth through the 20th century and around the world. But that's just for starters: It contains a lost, stolen, destroyed, found, translated and retranslated book called "The History of Love," characters named for other characters, cases of plagiarism and mistaken identity, and several crucial coincidences and chance meetings that are all maddeningly scrambled in an elliptical novel that shouldn't work but does.

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

The bestseller status of this book remains a mystery to me.

This is the sort of book that I didn't expect to like, given that the title seems ridiculously ambitious. But in a moment of optimism I bought it anyway, and boy did it pay off. Nicole Krauss skirts the intimidating topic of romantic love by sneaking up behind other kinds of love and encouraging them to stop leaning against the wall at the dance and get out there and share their groove thang. She weaves together disparate threads of lives until, by the end, you see the vast, beautiful, silken ascot they all comprise together. I loved the non-linear approach, the tiny details, the quiet way she hints at what makes us human. This book is everything I hope to find when I go to fiction. It reminded me to not take anything for granted... to take love where it finds me... not to scoff at any that comes along, albeit tiny and well camoflaged. Like the Grinch, when I read this book my heart grew three sizes.

This book was promising at the beginning, but proceeded to get sloppy and puzzling, and then ended in an unsatisfying and unclear way. It's a convoluted plot involving a Polish Jew who falls completely for a childhood girlfriend, writes a book about her, and then is separated from both by the Holocaust. Not knowing the book was eventually published by the friend to whom he gave it for safekeeping, he now lives his old age in New York, lonely and waiting to die. His story is interwoven with that of the friend who took the book and published it under his own name, and a young girl in New York who was named after the heroine of the book and goes searching for her namesake.

The chapters involving Leo, the author of the book, are well written and intriguing, very well (I imagine) reflecting the mindset and cranky humor of an old codger. The chapters about Alma, the namesake, are short, choppy, and disjointed, often going off on tangents that don't seem to have much to do with the plot. Then towards the end of the book, we all of a sudden start getting chapters written as diary entries of Alma's little brother. The odd change in format is an interruption to the flow, as is the final part of the book in which Alma and Leo finally meet; the POV switches rapidly back and forth between them, which I found slightly irritating. The ending was a bit of a let down after all of the buildup--perhaps I am not smart enough to understand it.

This was a gorgeously realized, thoroughly moving book. I love the way Krauss wove together the various threads of the story, the hazy lines between fiction and reality that really serve to illustrate the surreal, lonely lives of the characters within the book and the book within a book.

The passages from the history of love (which is the book within the book in question) are my favorite parts. The imagery she uses is unique, poignant, delicately beautiful, and connects wonderfully with the audience. Or it did with me. I put this book on my poetry shelf because that's what it felt like to me while reading it a lot of the time. Prose wasn't an adequate word for it.

It's themes are basic, but its insights and observations are acute and pointed, and I think bound to make the reader look inward at their own experience of love, romantic or otherwise. I certainly couldn't help doing so.

Men: Don't be frightened off by the title into think that this is chick-lit. It really, really isn't.

Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. They both live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and they both write clever, critically acclaimed novels featuring preciously innocent narrators, magical realism, and some safe postmodern "experiments" (blank pages, pictures, excessive repetition, etc.) that you'd notice just by flipping through. I loved Foer's Everything is Illuminated, liked his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close okay, and liked Krauss's History of Love a little less. I'm wondering now if my appreciation for Everything is Illuminated (and my waning appreciation for the other two books) is due to the fact that I read it first. I hope not.

Here there are three narrators: Leo Gursky, a Holocaust survivor and sometimes writer, living alone in New York, waiting to die; 14-year-old Alma Singer, a precocious girl who has to deal not only with her father's death but with her mother's subsequent depression as well; and a third person omniscent narrator who relates the story of a little-known book called (wait for it) The History of Love. It goes without saying that these characters are connected in ways they don't understand (hint: by the mysterious book) and that somehow this connection, once made, will help everyone involved. That's all fine.

Things, however, don't come together as well as they should at the end, despite some beautiful writing, and the book that lies at the core of this story, the book that has lived on for generations, changing lives along the way, is really just an annoyingly simple allegory about the genesis of "love" and other "feelings". Krauss has obvious talent, but it isn't enough to corral this messy pastiche of a novel.

"I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty. If a store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping my change all over the floor, the nickels and dimes skidding in every direction."

'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.'

This might be one of the most beautiful sentences in the arsenal of the english language. Actually, I came upon this sentence in one of those click bait  online articles entitled '50 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature.'  Not a dignified source, I admit. Nevertheless the list was composed of greats such as Solzhenitsyn, Plath, Maugham, Eliot, Garcia Marquez, Bronte, to lend it some small sort of credence. And so, recognizing about ninety percent of the writers, it was a pleasant surprise to see the sentence above resonate with me and not know the author. I looked up the book. Saw the great reviews, a lot of five stars from reviewers I trust. Got the book, read it, loved it.

If I could describe this novel using one word, it would be 'tender.' It is actually a rare occurrence for me to come across a book and feel emotion from the prose. This was one of those rare moments that I felt the writing get to me. It supplemented a nostalgic yet hopeful story engulfing it in gorgeous prose that would move even the most stoic of readers. I have to admit that lately I have been having a hard time connecting to the voices of the books I read, but this proved unbearable even for all my lethargy.

I'm not going to talk much about plot. It's a pointless exercise with a book as graceful. Just know that you are in good hands, and let it carry you. Surrender yourself.

This is a book that looks at love in all its forms. It transcends romance and goes to where other books about love, those that call it romance, fail. Humanity. It believes that at our very core, we are beings that are capable of giving parts and wholes of ourselves to people, to romantic partners, to parents, to sons and daughters, to siblings, to family, to friends, to strangers, to those who need us. I want to believe that as well.

I dedicate this review to the wonderful woman who graced the pages of Goodreads under the pen name of Fatty Bolger. It was her evocative and emotional review that drove me to pick up this magnum opus.

Quoting from the book, I think it is pertinent for me to say about Krauss, what she says about Isaac Mortiz, n  "To call him her a Jewish writer or, worse, an experimental writer, is to miss entirely the point of his her humanity, which resisted all categorization."n The History of Love is not a book written conventionally; it is an amalgamation of conventional themes, yes, but there is nothing conventional about its narration.

I studied Sociology for three years, and one of the techniques, I remember my professor telling me, to study Sociology is Verstehen. Google defines it as an "empathic understanding of human behaviour", but somehow, I prefer my professor's definition of it. She called it "putting yourself into the shoes of the person you study." She encouraged us to think like a killer, a woman (okay, this one doesn't hold for me, but you catch the drift), a homosexual... She said it was important, as a student of sociology to understand that the subject cannot be studied unless you feel for the societal subjects you are studying. I do have a point; I'm getting to it. Krauss is a flawless storyteller, and this is evident especially when she switches between chapters, each chapter written from the perspective of a different person. She perfectly manages to capture the love, the loss, the longing of Leo Gursky, an eighty-year old man, who has been alone, pining for the only woman, the only person whose opinion mattered, for a period of sixty years. A man waiting for his death, a man who knows that some day, very soon, his heart, his weakest part, will give out. She also seamlessly, in the next chapter, switches her tone to fit the voice of Alma Singer, a rather smart fifteen year old with a slow brother and a depressed mother. Alma Singer, who despite having lost her father hasn't lost her youth, or her drive to live. It's almost as if the division between the two chapters is a mirror; a mirror separating the youthful joy of Alma Singer from the aged indifference of Leo Gursky. Verstehen.

n  "All I want to do is die on a day I went unseen"n, Leopold Gursky says, as an eighty year old man, waiting for his day. He spends his days thinking about ways in which he may die; n  "Maybe this is how I’ll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me."n He spends his days thinking about love. About The History of Love. About her. The n  only person whose opinion he cared about.n n  "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. When they were ten he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven he kissed her for the first time. When they were thirteen they got into a fight and for three weeks they didn’t talk. When they were fifteen she showed him the scar on her left breast. Their love was a secret they told no one. He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. What if I die? she asked. Even then, he said. For her sixteenth birthday he gave her an English dictionary and together they learned the words. What’s this? he’d ask, tracing his index finger around her ankle, and she’d look it up. And this? he’d ask, kissing her elbow. Elbow! What kind of word is that? and then he’d lick it, making her giggle. What about this? he asked, touching the soft skin behind her ear. I don’t know, she said, turning off the flashlight and rolling over, with a sigh, onto her back. When they were seventeen they made love for the first time, on a bed of straw in a shed. Later—when things happened that they could never have imagined—she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?"n Sometimes, love is all we need. After all, n  it was his love for her that saved him.n

It is true that the love turned into loss. Because sometimes the things that are hardest to do, are the things that have to be done. Like walking away. Forever. But still, the pride that your legacy still lives on, in the guise of what you wanted to be, what you intended to be. That pride may save you. I interned at The Hindu about two and a half years ago, sometime in Winter 2013. Three of my articles got published with the by-line. It wasn't an achievement for me. My mother has framed photos of the article in her Office. Where she works. Because small as this may have seemed to me, no one was prouder of me than my parents. Isaac Mortiz may have been a best-selling author; no one loved his stories more than his father did. Unknown to his son, unseen to the world, Leo Gursky was a proud father. And when his son dies, unknown to his father, unexpectedly, Leo's world crashes. Because, really, does he have anything else to live for? n  "The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that leans always to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it."n

Alma Singer. Fifteen. In love (maybe). Has the dubious distinction of dealing with her depressed, aloof mother, and her rather slow, yet unflinchingly fanatical brother. n  "My mother is lonely even when we’re around her, but sometimes my stomach hurts when I think about what will happen to her when I grow up and go away to start the rest of my life. Other times I imagine I’ll never be able to leave at all."n A mother she wanted to love her less; n  "When I’d come in, she’d call me into her bedroom, take me in her arms, and cover me with kisses. She’d stroke my hair and say, “I love you so much,” and when I sneezed she’d say, “Bless you, you know how much I love you, don’t you?” and when I got up for a tissue she’d say, “Let me get it for you I love you so much,” and when I looked for a pen to do my homework she’d say, “Use mine, anything for you,” and when I had an itch on my leg she’d say, “Is this the spot, let me hug you,” and when I said I was going up to my room she’d call after me, “What can I do for you I love you so much,” and I always wanted to say, but never said: Love me less."n A girl who perhaps never had the chance to grieve wholeheartedly for her dead father because she had to care for her mother and brother. A brother who jumped off the roof of his school, because he thought he could fly. A girl, looking to find someone for her mother, so that she could explore the Arctic. A girl who believed that Alma was a real person, indeed. n  "“Of course she’s real.” “But how do you know?” “Because there’s only one way to explain why Litvinoff, who wrote the book, didn’t give her a Spanish name like everyone else.” “Why?” “He couldn’t.” “Why not?” “Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.”"n. A girl who memorised the Universal Edibility Test. A girl who fell in love with her best friend, but was too awkward to tell him so. A girl, whose story almost mirrored Leo's in so many ways. And yet. She has second chances.

Zvi Litvinoff, who did everything he did for love.

A tale of love, loss, and longing. How many times have we heard that before, you say? Only difference is, The History of Love deals with these in a ponderous, emotionally draining manner, that leaves you longing for more. And yet. The subtle elements of humour in it make it the brilliant book it is.

n  "At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat would be empty."n

Words.

This book is all about words – words written, words unwritten, words spoken, words unspoken, words imagined, words deleted, words carried, words discarded, words believed, words treasured. And why wouldn’t it be? At the heart of this book, is the book ‘The History of Love’ and its author, and his many intended and unintended recipients.

Does that make the book complex? Oh no, no; it makes it magical. Magic, as I see, is a beautiful truth suddenly broken to us. And in Krauss’ tale, she does it many times over.

Leopold Gursky is a recluse 80-years old Jewish Man of Polish origin, presently residing in America in a quiet neighbourhood whose silence is splintered by his only (and eccentric) childhood friend, Bruno. Having lost in love 60 years ago, he has survived most of his life drinking the fleeting images of his son, Isaac (a famous writer), from afar. His only wish now – his son reads the manuscript his scrawny fingers have jabbed on the typewriter in the past few years post a heart attack. In the same country but another world, lives the curious and awkward 14-year old Alma Singer who is trying hard to reignite the love her mother has relinquished after losing her husband to cancer. When a letter arrives one day from a certain Mr. Jacob Marcus, requesting her translator mother to translate ‘The History of Love’ from Spanish to English for a princely sum, Alma’s hopes are upped – she might have found a match for her mamma, after all.

As I read page after page, the sentiments seeped into the words became clearer – like some kind of a haze that one slowly peels off a window, one brush at a time. And the scenery that emerged as a result, was a gossamer of young dreams and old lessons, assimilating into each other to keep the magic called love, alive. None of the characters hurried; because love doesn’t come easy, it makes us wait and pass numerous tests. It is the bird that flutters on many windows but settles on that one which shelters it across all seasons. And this love is visible, in all its pulsating vigour and dogged longevity, in Krauss’ tale. The exchanges between friends, the response to tragedy, the adrenaline rush to fight impersonation, the willingness to sacrifice, the aspiration to pull off the unthinkable - the delightful narrative arc contained these themes with a mystery angle on one side and a biblio-slant on the other. And this approach imparted such a refreshing suppleness to the story that when the finale played out, I was transported to the venue and was made to feel completely at home.

From unearthing little truths about the past to embracing the extrapolations into future, this book presents love as an emotion that can outlive any person as long as the person, while living, never left its territory, and that includes the times he/ she chose to wear it over his/ her sleeves or hide it underneath.