I loved this book for its humanity and turns of phrase. OK there were a few too many "wells." What beautiful characters even if the plot was a bit much. One of the few books I've bought and passed on because it should be shared.

Fascinating.

Great original story. While it is sad its rescued from bleakness by Krauss’s subtle humour and her inclusion of a mystery. A pursuit to unravel the origin of an obscure novel also called ‘The History Of Love” the book within this book that also happens to contain some great passages - the chapter 'The Birth of Feeling' my personal fav. Krauss excels in writing rich believable characters. Switching POV mainly between Leo Gursky, a Holocaust survivor & Alma Singer, a 14-year old grieving the loss of her father - both terrific protagonists, the peripheral characters are as well. Standout’s; Alma’s kid brother Bird who imagines himself a *lamed vovnik and Bruno, Leo’s only friend broke my heart when revealed he’d also died back in ’41, his surprise appearance on the streets of New York nothing but a figment of Leo’s imagination  and the lifeline he grasps to keep from sinking into the madness of complete isolation.
“My old faithful. The soft down of your white hair lightly playing about your scalp like a half-blown dandelion. Many times I have been tempted to blow on your head and make a wish. Only a last scrap of decorum keeps me from it.”

Forgive me, I’m fixated on Leo – he drove me nuts! His obsession with dying, his pining over lost love. A good day for Leo involves some quality pigeon-watching time interspersed with fantasizing about his upcoming funeral. “Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust.”
He knocked me off balance - angered me that he did nothing to change the misery that was his life. I wanted to shake him, to shout at him ‘What's so hard, you can't find a bingo parlor? Make a few friends?” And yet. I adored him. For his humility “The year of my Bar Mitzvah I was visited by a plague of acne. As soon as the acne cleared my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face." his soul searching “I tried to make sense of things. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.” his tenacity, his “rejection of reality with its army of flat-footed facts.”

Funny, when I finished this a week ago I rated it 3½ stars, got thinking about it, changed to 4 – a month from now might bump it to 5. Point is, it improves on reflection. And while no one who didn't experience it 1st hand could ever begin to comprehend what a Holocaust survivor must feel, I caught a glimmer. Enough to understand - Leo was so wounded that he was incapable of change. Want to thank Arnie for his review - the little nudge I needed: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Hope you will read it to.
Cons: A great story that’s unnecessarily muddled – blame it on an overuse of literary tricks. I found myself having to go back & reread portions, sly of her but forgiven, I did catch nuances I'd missed. And yet.
________________________________________
*Lamed Vovnik: the thirty-six righteous people that God has chosen to save the world, duty bound to do acts of kindness for others and remain unknown to the world.
“Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

This was my first by Nicole Krauss and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It came to my attention through the reviews and comments of Goodreads friends, so for that I am grateful. Krauss uses several techniques, not necessarily unique but effective, to build suspense and to slowly reveal the events and actions behind the underlying mystery of this story. The two main characters in the story were discovering the truth along with the reader and neither the characters nor the reader had a full understanding of the truth until the very end. If Krauss or another author were to use this same combination of techniques in a different story, I might not find they worked as well, but in this story it all came together.

Structure and technique aside, it was the two main characters, Leo Gursky (Leopold) and Alma Singer, who really made the story come alive. Leo is an elderly Jew who survived in Poland during WWII by living in horrible conditions and later made it to the US where he earned a living as a locksmith. But from an early age, Leo was a writer and knew that was what he was meant to be. Alma Singer is named after the main character in Leo’s first book, The History of Love. She is a teenager who wants her mother to be happy, or at least not so sad, and wants her brother to get comfortable with who he is. Alma Singer thinks Alma Mereminski in The History of Love is a real person and begins a journey to find her.

The story is told in 1st person from the point of view of multiple characters. Sections of Leo’s first book are part of the story as well as letters and obituaries. The combination makes for a lively narration in which I never lost interest. There is a significant interconnecting of characters, a few which are the result of unlikely coincidences, but I was enjoying the story enough I found I was able to look past these.

At some point I will be reading another by Nicole Krauss to see if I can find the same or similar enjoyment.

Intricately crafted story with multiple points of view, centered around a book within the book. Leo Gursky wrote The History of Love about Alma, his childhood sweetheart. Leo tells his story in first person. It is year 2000 and he is eighty years old. He reflects back on life, love, loss, and loneliness. The second point of view is that of fifteen-year-old Alma Singer (named after the Alma of Leo’s book). The third is that of her brother, Bird, who believes he is a messenger of the Almighty.

The plot is compelled by a mystery, and young Alma is following clues to gain insight into her father’s life. She is trying to relieve her mother’s pain after the death of her father. Leo is still obsessed with his first love. He has endured many hardships during WWII in Poland, though the details of his experiences are mostly in the background. The book is beautifully written. I particularly enjoyed Leo’s story. It is a bittersweet tale, told with both humor and sadness. As is typical with Krauss’s books, there are a number of themes pertaining to Jewish history.

By page 11 I knew I was going to love this book. Krauss' writing style is simply incredible. I will admit I was somehwat confused by the story itself and had to back up several times (and the ending?), but reading this one tasted as good as a box of Godvia chocolates. If I ever catch up with all the books I want to read a first time, I will definitely revisit this one.

P.S. Did a little Google searching to try to figure out what I missed. While I was largely unsuccessful, I did find some interesting facts. This book is being made into a movie to debut in 2009. Krauss is married to fellow writer Jonathan Safran Foer, whose book "Everything is Illuminted" I found quite comical, but even more confusing than "History of Love" and certainly not as heartfelt. It was the runner up for the Orange Fiction prize in 2005 and was chosen as a Today Show read, and yet I still missed hearing about it until a couple months ago.

BEST REVIEW:

Monday, August 6, 2007
The History of Love: A Review by Julia Henderson

The History of Love was one of those books I avoided at first. Too many people told me how amazing it was, how much I'd love it, how I should run to the nearest independent bookstore and grab a copy.

All of that made me NOT want to read the thing, so I half-heartedly suggested it for my book club and felt not at all crushed when no one picked it. And then I saw it on a buy-one-get-one rack at the bookstore and picked it up. I really didn't know a thing about the book (except that people thought I'd like it), but from the moment I read the first paragraph, I was hooked by author Nicole Krauss's elegant, careful prose.

The author is married to Jonathan Safran Foer of similarly-topiced Everything Is Illuminated. They both live in Brooklyn and write non-traditionally about the Holocaust, and there's no doubt that Foer is the better-known author. But there was something in Krauss's book that tapped into my emotions much more successfully than Foer ever did.

The premise of the story isn't so unique: Teenaged lovers lose touch after the Germans invade Poland and desecrate a Jewish town and the survivors are never the same again; two adults fall in love over a book a generation later, and start a family; the father dies, the children are different because of his death; the young daughter tries to trace her parents' love; the lives of many people intersect in the small world of New York...but Krauss is so clever in the way she weaves these lives together that the reader finds herself completely and utterly immersed in the story, guessing at endings and seduced by the possibility of hope.

I usually speed-read -- afterall, there are too many good books in this world to justify reading slowly -- but The History of Love made me want to read slowly enough to savor every word. And it didn't surprise me that I stopped breathing for a moment when I read the last few sentences, or that instead of immediately moving on to the next book on my list, I waited a few days to give this one time to settle in. I even get that horrible jealous feeling when I see someone reading the novel on the subway...how lucky they are that they're still in the middle of it, how sad I am that I've finished it.

You'd be doing yourself a disservice not to read this book. If you need to borrow a copy, just let me know. I want my own copy to be passed to so many people that I get it back waterlogged by flood, fire-tarnished, tattered and worn.

Julia Henderson is Art Editor and Webmistress of Fringe.

FANTASTIC.....

A FAVORITE.....


I'll read it again!!!!!!


I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!

مادرم حتی وقتی ما دور‌ و برش هستیم هم تنهاست.اما از فکر این که وقتی بزرگ شوم و پی زندگی ام بروم او چه سرنوشتی پیدا میکند دلم به درد می آید.گاهی تصور میکنم هرگز قادر به ترک کردنش نباشم.
#تاریخ_عشق
#نیکول_کراوس
#ترانه_علیدوستی
#نشر_مرکز
*این کتاب در لیست کتابهایی که باید پیش از مرگ خواند قرار داره.
در عین پیچیدگی ساده بود و قلبت رو لمس میکرد.
چند راوی در چند زمان متفاوت داستان ارتباطشون به کتاب‌تاریخ عشق رو بیان میکنن.
خیلی نمیشه ازش نوشت ولی اگر دنبال خوندن یک کتاب متفاوت هستین که به چالش کشیده بشید و در عین حال داستان عاشقانه تلخی رو از زبان جنگ زده هایی که مجبور شدن کشورشون رو ترک کنن بشنوید حتما بخونیدش

This as a lovely surreal novel of loneliness and love. Taking the reader through a span of sixty years we meet Leo Gursky a retired locksmith living in Brighton Beach having escaped from the Nazis in his native land Poland in 1941. He carries the time when he was almost discovered with him constantly and fears the fact that he will die and no one will even notice. Alma, is fourteen and eventually there is a connection that is unveiled between she and Leo. Alma is desperately trying to find a remedy to her mother's loneliness after the death of her husband. Alma is also trying to help her younger brother who believes himself to be the next Messiah. Because of his strange behavior, he has no friends and the idea of socialization is an enigma to him.

How the characters of Leo and Alma connect, fills this novel with sadness, love, and a vision into how one's history does shape one's life. For the better or the worse our circumstances, our history, our love, is what makes us people of connections. In this novel, Ms Krauss shows us that love comes in many different ways and in this big world connections can and will be made and that so often those very connections affect us in ways that we can only dream of.

n  Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.n

A piece of music that goes perfectly and lyrically with the quote above: Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT1Ii...

It is an excellent book, one of the best I have ever read in the recent years. Although the backstory about WWII is quite heavy on the Oh we are the poor Jews, Nazi had done horrible, horrible things to us, YOU SHOULD FEEL SORRY FOR US! side. And of course there is not a single word about what they had done to the Palestinians after WWII. That is the only thing about this book I would make a small complaint about.

Review for another book by the same author: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Original Comments (Pre-Review):

I would like to review this novel more formally in the near future, but to do so I'll have to flick through it and refresh my memory.

My reaction at the time was that it was one of the best novels I had ever read.

Nicole Krauss understands people and love and feelings and she writes about them in a word perfect way.

As a reader, I am prepared to go wherever she wants to take me. I will trust her judgement.

I have recently watched a few of her videos and interviews on Youtube and she's also someone who I enjoy listening to when she speaks about her craft and her choice of subject matter.

This probably sounds very gushy and naive, but I promise to write something more considered.




Review (September 26, 2011):


Warning about Spoilers

I have tried to minimise and identify plot spoilers.

However, this is an emotional response to the novel, and might reveal significance that you might want to enjoy by way of your own detection.

I hope that my review doesn't spoil anything for you, or if it does, that you quickly forget it.


Lives Lived and Measured by the Deli Counter

Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love” is one of my favourite novels of all time.

I read it once pre-Good Reads, and have just re-read it, so that I could review it. And I will read it again. Often.

That doesn’t count the numerous times I have fingered through the book seeking out passages and expressions and meanings and significances that stimulated or appealed to me.

It’s an exquisitely crafted tale of love, loss, longing, hope, defiance, resilience and, it has to be said, delusion.

I love its Jewish wisdom and concern with the family, I love its Yiddish rhythms and expressions and humour and playfulness, I love the window it offers into the millennia of Jewish culture and enrichment of the world.

When I open the pages of this book, I feel like I am walking into the best delicatessen or pastry shop in the world.

Everything is there on display, everything is on offer (we can eat in or take away!).

It’s all been made with consummate skill and affection, it’s designed to satiate our appetite, to enrich our lives.

I look at it all, knowing it will feed us, it will sustain us, it will revive our energy.

It’s food for thought, it’s food for life.

I'm sure it will help us live our own lives and tell our own tales, it will equip each of us to tell our own History of Love.

I am wearing my Second Avenue Deli t-shirt as I think and type this.

Legend

“The History of Love” is written from four different perspectives, each of which is represented by a different symbol at the beginning of the chapter:

Leo Gursky = a heart

Alma Singer = a compass

Omniscient Narrator = an open book

Bird (Alma’s brother) = an ark

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, there was a Polish boy named Leo Gursky who loved a girl across the field named Alma Mereminski.

“Her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering”.

He asked her to marry him when they were both still only ten.

“He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived.

"What if I die? She asked. Even then, he said.”

He carved “A+L” in the bark of a tree and had someone take a photo of the two of them in front of that tree.

He writes three books for her, all in their native Yiddish, the last being “The History of Love”.

Book 1: this one was about Slonim (Alma says, “she liked it better when I made things up”)

Book 2: he made up everything for this one (Alma says, “maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything”)

Book 3: “The History of Love” (Leo says,"I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only things I knew.”)

In July, 1941, that boy, who was now a man of 21, avoided murder by the German Einsatzgruppen, because he was lying on his back in the woods thinking about the girl.

“You could say it was his love for her that saved his life.”

Alma’s father had already saved her by sending her to America.

Unbeknown to either of them, Alma was pregnant with their son, Isaac, when she left.

Oblivious to the birth of his son, Leo lives in hiding surrounded by Nazi atrocities.

Letters back and forth fail to reach their destination.

He even writes his own obituary, when he is in the depths of illness and despair.

By the time Leo finally escapes to New York himself, five years later, he has become an invisible man in the face of death.

He traces Alma, only to learn that she has had their child and that, believing he was dead, she has married another man.

He is ecstatic that “our sum had come to equal a child” ("A+L=I").

He asks her once to “come with me”, she can’t and he does the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

He has little involvement with Alma or Isaac after that, except as an occasional remote observer.

And yet.

He continues to love Alma, though he now has another quest: to determine whether Isaac, who becomes a famous writer in his own right, ever knew about his father and that he wrote “The History of Love”.

Once Upon Another Timeline

Once upon another time (it is the year 2000 when Leo is 80 and believes he is approaching death), a precocious 15 year old girl goes by the name Alma Singer.

Her mother, Charlotte, a literary translator who specialises in Spanish literature, named her after every girl in a book Alma’s father David gave her mother called “The History of Love”.

It is written in Spanish, and the "author" is Zvi Litvinoff, a friend of Leo’s who, after Leo left Poland, escaped to Chile, carrying with him the original Yiddish manuscript of “The History of Love” for safekeeping.

Alma’s father died when she was seven.

Like Leo, Charlotte has continued to love him (“my mother never fell out of love with my father”) and has never felt the need or desire to love another man.

When Charlotte disposes of some of his possessions, Alma rescues an old sweater and decides to wear it for the rest of her life.

She manages to wear it for 42 days straight.

Alma is on her own quest: to know her own father better, to help her younger brother Bird to know him too, to find a lover for her mother and to learn more about her namesake in “The History of Love”.

In the midst of this assortment of delicacies, Charlotte receives a letter asking her to translate “The History of Love” from Spanish to English.

Family Plot

I have included the above plot details, despite my normal reluctance to summarise plots in reviews.

Please don’t construe any of the details as spoilers. Most of them are revealed in the first forty pages, only not necessarily in that order.

And I have left out a lot of the back story, so that I could set up this context, that family is fundamental to the plot, to “The History of Love”, not to mention history itself.

The Paleontological Detective

Every crime needs its own detective and every detective needs their own methodology, even a child detective.

Nicole Krauss twice mentions the task of paleontologists.

“Bird asked what a paleontologist 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 his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.

“The only difference is that paleontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life.

“Every fourteen-year-old should know something about where she comes from, my mother said. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of how it all began.”

Here, the historical quest, the puzzle depends on your perspective.

And there are two, the young and the old, the present and the past joining together to construct the future.

For Alma, the young, the puzzle is what happened before “The History of Love” found its way into her family?

For Leo, the old, it is what happened after he wrote “The History of Love”?

Both have to sit down, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently, and work their own methodical way towards a solution of their own puzzle.

In a way, their problem is the same: the problem of family.

Leo loses a (prospective) wife and a son, Charlotte loses a husband, Alma loses a father.

They have all lost the story of their family, of their love.

Here, the novel is symbolic of the fate of the Jewish Family in the face of the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora.

The Jewish Family has been dispersed all over the world, family members have been separated, the spine of their love and connections and cultures and books and stories has been severed.

Their book has been shred into a hundred pieces and cast into the wind.

Somebody has to scour the world, to find the surviving “scraps”, piece it all together again and reconstruct their history and their culture.

And it will take a paleontologist. Or two.

You Can Only Lose What You Once Had

Leo once had Alma. He had a lover whom he loved and who loved him.

He lost her, but he kept his love alive, just as he hoped that the object of his love was still alive (she actually lived until 1995).

The novel is almost mythical or mythological in the way it tells this tale.

Charlotte tells young Alma: “The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma.”

So Leo and Alma are almost posited against Adam and Eve as the first boy and girl, the first to have mortal parents, the first children who ever fell in love with each other, the first to create a new family.

Without the object of his love, he wrote about it.

He kept his love alive, his love kept him alive.

As he wrote in his own obituary, “He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.”

And yet. His life stalled when he lost the object of his love.

He ceased to live for any purpose other than the preservation of his love.

His love became a fabrication that substituted for and subsumed his life.

He appears to be in two minds about this:

On the one hand, what more to life is there but love?

“I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said….What is more than her love? I asked.”

On the other hand, he recognised that he needed his invention in order to survive, that reality would have killed him.

“What do I want to tell you? The truth? What is the truth? That I mistook your mother for my life? No. Isaac, I said. The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”

And again, his confrontation of the truth:

“The truth is that she told me that she couldn’t love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don’t know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.”

And:

“And now at the end of my life, I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.”

Perhaps, the truth is whatever works for you.

“My Friend Bruno”

Leo constantly refers to his friend Bruno.

I have only one head, but I am in two minds as to whether he is real or make believe.

He might be a self-generated survival tool.

He is modelled on Bruno Schulz, the Polish author of "The Street of Crocodiles", which is referred to a number of times in the novel.

He died in 1942, and Leo even mentions that he died in 1941 in the novel.

He attempts suicide in the novel, unsuccessfully, so there might be a sense in which he is a darker twin of Leo, who nevertheless manages to prolong his life (in the same way Zvi Litvinoff manages to prolong his life by confiscating and caring for Leo's obituary when he seemed like he was about to die).

His role diminishes as Leo embraces reality over the course of the novel.

“And Yet”

And yet. “And yet.”

These two words are so important to the novel.

They express Leo’s defiance, his determination not to accept the hand dealt to him, his determination to avoid and evade the evil and the crime and the misfortune around him.

It is his imagination, his ability to believe in something else that allows him to achieve this:

“I remember the time I first realised I could make myself see something that wasn’t there…And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe…So I tried…And I found I could.”

He has to imagine a better world than the one he has inherited or the one that his world has become.

It was his love that enabled him to stop thinking and worrying about death, to stop worrying about the inevitability of his fate.

To this extent, love is what keeps us alive, it is our heartbeat, it is the reason our heart beats (even if occasionally it causes our heart to skip a beat).

Love is the defiance of death.

It’s not just something we do while waiting to die, it’s something that keeps us alive.

It keeps individuals alive, it keeps families alive, it keeps cultures alive and it keeps communities alive.

Putting Your Legacy into Words

The great tragedy within Leo’s life after Alma is that he believes his greatest creation, “The History of Love”, has been lost.

In fact, it has been misappropriated, albeit without ill will.

Again, I don’t mean this to be a spoiler. We, the readers, already know that it must exist in some form, if Alma’s family can read it and Charlotte can be asked to translate it from Spanish to English.

Obviously, part of the resolution of the puzzle for Leo must be the recovery of his legacy.

It is one of the things that will bond him with the family he had (but wasn’t really able to have).

The other thing we find out at the beginning of the novel is that Leo has had a heart attack that has killed one quarter of his heart.

This reinvigorates his fear of death and the concern that he might die an invisible man, survived only by “an apartment full of shit”.

And yet, it also reinvigorates his creativity (which had stalled as well).

Within months, he starts to write again, 57 years after he had previously stopped (possibly when he had finished "The History of Love" and had become an invisible man during the War?).

What he writes ends up being 301 pages long, “it’s not nothing”.

It’s his memoir, starting off “once upon a time”, in the manner of a fable or a fairy tale, which he almost calls “Laughing and Crying and Writing and Waiting”, but ends up naming “Words for Everything”.

It’s a polite, but defiant, retort to Alma’s childhood challenge, “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”

Maybe there isn’t a word for everything, but as “The History of Love” itself illustrates, in the hands of the right person, it is possible to say everything in words.

Leo sends the novel off to the address he finds for Isaac, in the hope that he will read it, only to read soon after that his only child has died.

And yet...what Leo accomplishes over the course of the novel is the knowledge that his son had learned the truth of their family by reading “Words for Everything” and that the true authorship of “The History of Love” had finally become known.

His legacy has become concrete, and he can die content.

Alma Singer

What more can I say about Alma?

She might not be blonde, she might not be beautiful, she might not be full-breasted (she's only 15), but she is an angel.

Whereas Leo is contemplative to the point of occasional melancholy, Alma is an inquisitive, optimistic, dynamic, witty breath of fresh air (perhaps, it's the way she flaps her wings?).

Her contributions to the story come in journal entries with numbered headings. (I like that!)

And yet, it has to be said that her detective skills alone are not sufficient to lead her to the denouement of this fable.

In the end, she realises that she has been searching for the wrong person.

She might be the pointer to the future, her symbol might be the compass, but she is unable to find true north alone.

If only because she wasn’t present when a crucial phone call was made, the story needs her brother Bird to intervene, just like a “Lamed Vovnik” would do. (Note: look it up like I did!)

Her contribution ends up being a family affair.

Lucky for her.

Lucky Alma. Lucky Leo.

A+L

The last section of the book departs from the Legend at the beginning of this review.

Instead, it is headed with the inscription “A+L” that Leo carved into the tree in his childhood.

Each page is narrated alternately by Leo and Alma Singer.

It is clear that Leo believes he has been invited to Central Park on Saturday, October 14, 2000, so that he can finally die.

When Alma appears, he initially believes that she is an angel.

“So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.”

Just as Leo and his friend Bruno use tapping to establish whether one of them has died (two taps means, “I’m alive”, the tactile affirms vitality), Leo taps Alma twice to prove to himself that he is alive and that she is real and not an angel.

“I wanted to say her name aloud, it would have given me joy to call, because I knew that in some small way it was my love that named her. And yet. I couldn’t speak. I was afraid I’d choose the wrong sentence.”

At this most crucial time, you would think that there wasn't a word for everything, when in fact there was only one word that would suffice: "Alma".

More happens, but I’ll deal with that under the SPOILER ALERT heading.

Suffice it to say that the novel affords Leo some last joy.

And who among us could deny that he earned that joy?

SPOILER ALERT

For me, the eternal optimist, there is some small ambiguity about whether Leo actually dies then and there at the end.

Leo appears to stop tapping in order to speak Alma’s name, which he does.

The novel ends with Alma tapping Leo twice (which means that she is alive).

Leo contemplates the timing of his death when he starts writing “Words for Everything”:

“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.”

Obviously, he didn’t actually die when he finished writing the memoir, because he posted the finished work to Isaac.

However, it’s possible that he died when Nicole Krauss finished the penultimate chapter of “The History of Love”.

Certainly, her book (like the Spanish edition), finishes with the obituary Leo Gursky wrote for himself.

And yet...

Dedication

This review is dedicated to the memory of Abe Lebewohl (the founder of the Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan) and to my daughter who turns 16 today and who lost her father in Manhattan and still hasn’t found him again...And yet...he laughs and cries and writes and waits...

I tend to be an emotional reader and my ratings reflect that. I finish books filled with excitement or sadness or intense dislike and write equally passionate reviews/rants, often including snazzy gifs to make my point. This is why some classics get 1 star and J.K. Rowling gets 5 stars and even Twilight gets 2 stars - I feel it's almost impossible to objectively judge quality of writing and literary value, so I usually rate based on the emotional effect the book had on me. That being said, I occasionally think there are some books that are just built on a clever concept and become better the more you sit and think about what you've just read.

In my opinion, The History of Love is one of those books.

For one thing, this novel is something of a work of art. The graphic design - even of the dedications page - feels important to the novel without seeming overly gimmicky. I've actually always loved the concept of a book within a book: when a book, which forms part of the plot, also ties in with the physical book in your hands (or ebook, perhaps).

In this case, the story features a book entitled - you guessed it - The History of Love, which carries an obituary at the end identical to the one at the end of this book. The real message behind the story is that by writing about things and stories, people who are dead and experiences that are long past are given the opportunity to live on through words. The fictional The History of Love in the story stays alive across time and continents because people read it and keep the memories alive. The implication with the ending of this book is that Krauss is doing the same and encouraging readers to keep Leo and his story alive.

Another thing I love is having very different stories that run parallel to one another and intersect in ways you wouldn't imagine. I like the exploration of how small, subtle things can shape people's lives and how one unsuccessful author can have such a huge effect on the life of someone they never met. I guess in some ways it did make me feel quite emotional, but it took some thinking about first.

I found Leo Gursky to be exactly the kind of character who evokes sympathy from me, but especially within this kind of context. We are introduced to him as an aging and extremely lonely man who is preoccupied with his own mortality and impending death. Once upon a time, Leo lived in Poland, fell in love with a woman called Alma, and wrote her a book he called The History of Love (which he believes was lost in a flood). But with fascism on the rise in Germany, however, Alma's father sends her to the United States where she builds a new life that Leo isn't a part of.

When Leo finally makes it to the USA, he has no place in Alma's life and must forge a new lonely existence in a strange country. Meanwhile, another story is taking place somewhere completely different. A teenage girl called Alma was named after the character in The History of Love - her parents' favourite book that was, in fact, published - and she is currently trying to deal with the death of her father. In yet another parallel story, Zvi Litvinoff is the man who stole and published Leo's manuscript and now feels a terrible guilt for doing so. All these lives move alongside one another, rarely actually touching, but making waves for the others all the same.

For me, the real message here is about the power of words and stories. How they can shape lives and have long-term effects that most of us don't recognise as they're affecting us. It's about the power that lies in being able to tell your story and having it be heard. It took me a while to compile my thoughts, but I highly recommend this book for those looking for a thought-provoking little read.

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