“The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss
I’d been meaning to read Nicole Krauss’ History of Love for a while; some trusted friends like Duff had recommended it; that’s her lovely photo above. So when it was a choice for the Twin Cities’ book group Books and Bars, I decided to give it a go. I started a copy I got from the library, but wasn’t able to finish by the time it was due; no renewals were allowed, as it had a wait list. So I bought a copy, and am glad I did. The History of Love is not long, but it’s deep and complex, and I can’t wait to read it again.
The book begins in the voice of Leo Gursky, an elderly Holocaust survivor afraid of dying unnoticed in New York City. He devises behavioral schemes to make himself noticed–spills things in stores, talks in movies, falls down on the street. Krauss swiftly and skillfully makes an annoying person a sympathetic one. Leo is funny, and he’s a writer. He also has a complicated history of love. He loved a woman once, but she went to America and married another.
Leo’s sections alternate mostly with those of Alma, a young Jewish girl whose mother is a translator of books, and whose father died early in her childhood. Alma writes notes to herself disguised as a survival notebook, and she has a fragile relationship with her brother Bird, who thinks he is a lamed vovnik, one of 36 chosen ones on Earth.
Bird gets a section, and the fictional book by the character Zvi Litvinoff, History of Love, gets a few, too. Yet the changes in voice and setting were never confusing, though I can’t say that about the book as a whole. The obfuscation is deliberate, though, as boundaries and stories are blurred and mixed. Events build momentum to a powerful conclusion, one that made me want to turn back and begin all over again. That this thought made me happy to do so, and that I think I’ll do so after I finish my current book, is a mark of how highly I admire and enjoyed The History of Love. Krauss’ husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, is the more famous novelist, but I wonder if Krauss might be the more skilled. This book made me think and feel, as well as go off in search of more information. Highly recommended.
January 28th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
I read this one for my book club a few years ago and I absolutely loved it. The prose, the story, it was all so very beautiful. Since then I’ve read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Foer, which touches on some similar issues (and the two books were compared when they were released) and I still think this one is vastly superior (not that the Foer was bad, but it paled in comparison).
I’ve got a copy of Krauss’s first novel, Man Walks Into A Room, but haven’t read it yet. You remind me that I should.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
History of Love was one of those books that I wanted to re-read almost immediately. Instead, I checked out Man Walks into a Room. Fantastic first novel, also about memory. I can’t wait to see what she does next…could be big.