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The History of Love: A Novel |  |
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The History of Love: A Novel | |
The History of Love spans of period of over 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. At the center of each main character's psyche is the issue of loneliness, and the need to fill a void left empty by lost love. Leo Gursky is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. ("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.") Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer vacillates between wanting to memorialize her dead father and finding a way to lift her mother's veil of depression. At the same time, she's trying to save her brother Bird, who is convinced he may be the Messiah, from becoming a 10-year-old social pariah. As the connection between Leo and Alma is slowly unmasked, the desperation, along with the potential for salvation, of this unique pair is also revealed.
The poetry of her prose, along with an uncanny ability to embody two completely original characters, is what makes Krauss an expert at her craft. But in the end, it's the absolute belief in the uninteruption of love that makes this novel a pleasure, and a wonder to behold. --Gisele Toueg --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The last words of this haunting novel resonate like a pealing bell. "He fell in love. It was his life." This is the unofficial obituary of octogenarian Leo Gursky, a character whose mordant wit, gallows humor and searching heart create an unforgettable portrait. Born in Poland and a WWII refugee in New York, Leo has become invisible to the world. When he leaves his tiny apartment, he deliberately draws attention to himself to be sure he exists. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love, which, unbeknownst to Leo, was published years ago in Chile under a different man's name. Another family in New York has also been truncated by loss. Teenager Alma Singer, who was named after the heroine of The History of Love, is trying to ease the loneliness of her widowed mother, Charlotte. When a stranger asks Charlotte to translate The History of Love from Spanish for an exorbitant sum, the mysteries deepen. Krauss (Man Walks into a Room) ties these and other plot strands together with surprising twists and turns, chronicling the survival of the human spirit against all odds. Writing with tenderness about eccentric characters, she uses earthy humor to mask pain and to question the universe. Her distinctive voice is both plangent and wry, and her imagination encompasses many worlds.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post
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.
Leo Gursky, a retired locksmith in New York, opens the story with an irresistible monologue about the anxieties of old age. "I often wonder," he says, "who will be the last person to see me alive." For 60 years being seen and staying alive have been his primary concerns. When he was a boy in Poland, invisibility was the only way to escape the Nazis, but now, as an old man with a damaged heart, being seen is a defiant act of survival.
"I try to make a point of being seen," he says. "Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty. If the 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. I'll get down on my knees. It's a big effort for me."
We meet Leo as he's contemplating answering an ad for a nude model. Krauss takes a risk by tottering along with this old-man shtick, but she portrays him with such tenderness that his story is at least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. We learn that Leo lost his family and friends in the war, that he escaped to America and that he fell into a career as a locksmith that closed the door on his plans to be a writer.
He's spent 60 years pining for the love of his life and watching from afar the son he could never acknowledge. Now, nearing what he's sure must be imminent death, he fights for attention and tries to keep an old friend in the apartment above him from committing suicide.
Elsewhere in New York, a young teenage girl named Alma describes her fractured family in a series of numbered journal entries. Her father died when she was 7, and the loss has thrown her into a program of ardent survivalism: studying how to make tea from acorns, start a fire with her knife, and set up a tent in three minutes. For her younger brother, nicknamed Bird, their father's death has inspired a Messiah complex that leads him to build an ark and jump off buildings. She does her best to keep an eye on him and prod him into normalcy, but frankly, she's not cut out for the job, being pretty eccentric herself.
And besides, she's preoccupied with her mother, a translator who has only had two dates since her husband died. "She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met," Alma writes. "In order to do this, she's turned life away. . . . 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."
Alma's plan to save her mom (and herself) revolves around a strange book written in Spanish, called "The History of Love," by a Polish writer who escaped to Chile in 1941. Alma's parents named her after the woman in the book, and she becomes convinced that the cure for her mother's loneliness can be found by unraveling its mysteries and tracking down the characters in New York City.
(Is it peevish to note the extremely loud and incredibly close similarities between elements of this book and the new novel by Krauss's husband, Jonathan Safran Foer? -- the weirdly precocious child following obscure clues around New York in search of information about a dead father, the flashbacks to Nazi atrocities, the key/lock motif, the pages with just a few words on them. As someone who enjoyed both novels immensely, I didn't find these similarities annoying, but they do raise interesting questions about the symbiosis between these two wildly inventive authors. PhD candidates, start your engines!)
For much of the novel, the stories of young Alma and old Leo seem to run in different orbits, but the obscure Spanish book provides a haunting, if vague, connection between them. Krauss has rather daringly created a number of excerpts supposedly from the book, which she laces into the narrative as Alma's mother renders them into English: strange, sometimes comic legends, anecdotes of courtship and devotion, and surreal reflections on romance. If you're one of those impatient readers who always skip the quotations, make an exception for these passages because they sound like a cross between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gabriel García Márquez. In a chapter called "The Age of Silence," for instance, we learn that once "no distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life." A chapter called "Love Among the Angels" claims that "even among the angels, there is the sadness of division." How easy it would have been for Krauss to write about this odd little book without actually creating passages from it to justify the tangled affections that grow up around it. Even in moments of startling peculiarity, she touches the most common elements of the heart. For Leo, obsessed with his death but struggling to be noticed, and for Alma, ready to grow up but arrested by her mother's grief, the persistence of love drives them to an astonishing connection. In the final pages, the fractured stories of The History of Love fall together like a desperate embrace.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Krauss’s second novel (after 2002’s Man Walks Into a Room) originally appeared in abbreviated form in The New Yorker. That piece failed to capture the novel’s maddening complexity and brilliance. Critics describe History of Love as poignant, hilarious, and ingenious—and perhaps too smart for its own good. The literary pyrotechnics that some commended—the doppelgängers, the "decoding" of different journal entries, translations, and lists, the nested stories—confounded others. "The writer’s connections are closer to tangles," complained the Los Angeles Times, and mask a simple, powerful, message. Yet most reviewers, who quickly compared Krauss’s work to her husband Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (*** page 38), agreed that her work is more restrained, her characters more illuminating, and the novel as a whole a bit superior.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
If one were to judge from Krauss' characters, the history of love is a story of loss and survival. Budding writer Leo Gursky flees the Nazis unharmed but arrives in New York too late to marry his sweetheart. Brokenhearted, he becomes a locksmith (the source of lovely metaphors) and puts down his pen for 57 years. Just as he starts to write again, teenage Alma loses her father. She copes with her grief by reading up on how to live in the wild but worries about her bookish, increasingly isolated mother and Messiah-obsessed younger brother. Krauss, as so many have before her, including Steve Stern in The Angel of Forgetfulness [BKL F 1 05], constructs an intriguing books-within-a-book narrative. Leo turns out to be secretly connected to a famous writer. Another Holocaust survivor woos his beloved with an unusual manuscript, and Alma turns sleuth in her quest for the real-life inspiration for her namesake, a character in a novel titled The History of Love. Venturing into Paul Auster territory in her graceful inquiry into the interplay between life and literature, Krauss is winsome, funny, and affecting. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
A complex, funny, sad, elegantly constructed meditation on the power of love, language and imagination. -- Seattle Times, Mary Brennan
A significant novel, genuinely one of the year's best. -- New York
Brilliant. An achievement of extraordinary depth and beauty. -- Newsday
Confirms the depth and breadth of her talent. -- Vogue
Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense. -- Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
Ingenious. -- Entertainment Weekly
Luminous prose….Krauss is a masterful storyteller…a writer of astonishing breadth. -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
Moving and virtuosic. -- San Francisco Chronicle
The novel's achievement is precisely, not negligibly, this: to have made a new fiction—alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting. -- LA Weekly
Wonderful and haunting....Deftly layered …with deceptively nimble humor and unsentimental tenderness. -- Miami Herald, Connie Ogle
