The History of Love: A Novel

The History of Love: A Novel
By Nicole Krauss


Product Description
The illuminating national bestseller: "Vertiginously exciting…vibrantly imagined….[Krauss is] a prodigious talent."—Janet Maslin, New York Times

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn't know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full—keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild—she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories.

This extraordinary book was inspired by the author's four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss—Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.


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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #1273 in Books
Published on: 2006-05-01
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
272 pages

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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is a hauntingly beautiful novel about two characters whose lives are woven together in such complex ways that even after the last page is turned, the reader is left to wonder what really happened. In the hands of a less gifted writer, unraveling this tangled web could easily give way to complete chaos. However, under Krauss's watchful eye, these twists and turns only strengthen the impact of this enchanting book.

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

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.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.


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Customer Reviews
The History of Love
More aptly named, this book would be called The History of Love Lost, because each central character suffers from the loss of a love.

The storyline opens with the amusing, but desperately sad Leo Gursky. Facing the end of his life, Leo fears that no one will notice when he dies. He lives his remaining days in such a way as to make others notice him. One day he may push over a display at the grocery store. Another day, he may pose nude for an art class. His character is so incredibly realistic, that the reader can empathize and share with him his feelings of isolation.

Interwoven with this plot are other more minor ones, each with equally endearing characters and overwhelming feelings of loneliness.

Although the characters are each so remarkably unique and interesting, the story can be difficult at times. The intermingling of the different plots and characters makes this a confusing book at times. Another difficulty is the darkness of the plot. In spite of these, this is a worthwhile experience.


Just okay
"The History of Love" was good, but not great. The story itself is interested enough, and spans over the course of 60 years. Leo Gursky, a retired locksmith, immigrated to the United States as a young man after escaping SS officers in Poland. He arrived in New York in search of his true love, Alma, who left Poland several years before him. Hoping to resume their love affair, Leo is devastated by what he finds, and spends the rest of his life in relative isolation. Meanwhile, Alma Singer is a 14-year-old girl who was named after a character in an old book. Alma copes with family problems and teenage angst while trying to unravel the mystery of her namesake, which is ultimately tied to the aging Leo Gursky.

I had high expectations of this novel, but was somewhat let down. The narration shifts back and forth between several characters, with most of them being devoted to Leo and Alma Singer. I enjoyed Leo's chapters most of all. Author Nicole Krauss did a great job capturing the voice of an old Jewish man. (And yet. There were a few things about the writing that annoyed me. One of the things is the way Krauss used the phrase "And yet" about 370,000 times. ARRGH!) Alma's chapter's were okay, but they didn't hold my attention as well. Many of the details of the story are difficult to follow, and I was disappointed with the way the book ended. "The History of Love" is an interesting book with a unique format and memorable story, but I think the author could have done a lot more with it.

Pleasntly surprised
I found this book in an airport book store because i wanted something to read for my flight. I knew nothing about it and was pleasantly surprised by the beauty and sadness of the book. The characters are very dynamic and have stayed with me.