The History of Love: A Novel by Nicole Krauss Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The History of Love: A Novel
Book Review: A Wonderful Exploration of Chance and Coincidence
Summary: 4 Stars
THE HISTORY OF LOVE, Nicole Krauss's second novel, is a complex story that doesn't lend itself well to being summed up in a nice, neat plot synopsis. For one thing, the book travels back and forth in time, narrated by several characters, sometimes in the form of letters, diaries, and even a novel-within-a-novel (also, not coincidentally, called THE HISTORY OF LOVE). For another thing, the book is a sort of mystery, revealing name changes, betrayals, and secret identities as the plot unfolds.
Perhaps the best way to explore THE HISTORY OF LOVE, then, is to introduce its two main characters. The first is the elderly Leopold Gursky, an almost tragically pathetic character living in a squalid apartment in New York City. Terrified that he has become invisible to the rest of the world, Leo makes a point of trying to make himself be seen every day, whether it is by purposefully spilling his coffee drink on himself at Starbucks or by volunteering to be a nude model for a life drawing course.
Originally from Poland, Leo immigrated to New York after World War II, his heart having been broken by Alma, the only girl he would ever love, and by Isaac, the son who doesn't even know he exists. Now, nearing the end of his life, Leo reflects often on the meaning of his life, on what will be left of him after he is gone. He thinks, "At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived." What Leo doesn't know is that he does have a surprising legacy that may or may not keep him from being invisible forever.
Not far away from Leo Gursky, also in New York City, lives Alma Singer. Named after the heroine in her mother's favorite book, fifteen-year-old Alma wants to be a naturalist. She collects tips in notebooks she titles "How to Survive in the Wild," and she takes pains to classify her world --- and her words --- in the careful tone and style of a scientist. Alma and her younger brother Bird are both coping with the recent death of their father, as is Alma's mother, a translator who receives a surprising commission from a mysterious stranger --- to translate an obscure Spanish book titled THE HISTORY OF LOVE into English. Alma, who imposes all kinds of romantic fantasies on the stranger who communicates only by letters, starts out on a quest to find the letter writer as well as the real-life Alma who may have inspired the novel's author.
In the end, Leo and Alma come together in a surprising way --- and by means of a most unexpected catalyst. With its exploration of chance and coincidence and its multi-layered plot, Nicole Krauss's THE HISTORY OF LOVE will remind many of Paul Auster's novels and stories. Krauss's prose is remarkably versatile, skillfully using stylistic devices to differentiate the voices of her many narrators. In addition to being a genuinely well-crafted (if not exactly suspenseful) mystery story, Krauss's novel is by turns comic, mythic, thoughtful, and almost heartbreakingly sad.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Book Review: Extremely faithful and incredibly pure
Summary: 5 Stars
The History of Love is a great novel. Plotted with exquisite precision, propelled by deeply sympathetic characters, and crammed full of mysteries and solutions, this book lights up neural networks you never knew you had. Besides recounting the stories of a 15 year old girl and a Holocaust survivor, Krauss's novel is also the story of a book (The History of Love). What it says about books is just as important as what it says about love, even if it isn't going to make the end-of-paper movement at cartel Microsoft very happy.
Nicole Krauss understands books to be what no other medium is: self-contained, tough, mobile over continents and generations and languages, full of the future as inscribed by a piece of someone's soul. The History of Love (the novel within the novel) has a provenance that would make a Rembrandt painting blush: written in Poland, manuscript given away then stolen, conceived in Yiddish, translated to Spanish, published in Argentina, found by a Jewish traveler, given to his wife, secretly translated into English, discovered by a 15 year old girl in New York, AND MORE. In Krauss's telling, none of this is random, and even though characters act unaware of each other, the larger plan somehow manifests G*d in the lives of the Living. Why don't I just write it: according to Krauss, when the soul of the writer is pure, a book becomes an immanent sacred object. And in that way, books are a lot like love, only rectangular and full of numbered pages.
If we esteemed writers by what their novels hold faith with, Nicole Krauss would sweep this year's fiction awards. Besides her faith in the power of the written word, there's faith in the integrity and goodness of young outsiders, in the quest to redeem history in old age, in the ability of human beings to shape their own destiny no matter how complicated and compromised, and in the presence of love as an active agent for good in the universe. Last, but not least, Krauss has faith that writers can change the world through writing. If they can, and she has, then we're just a little better off today than we were before The History of Love came into the world of readers.
Book Review: flawed but sometimes terrific
Summary: 2 Stars
This book reads like a short story that got expanded just to make it a book. The story of the old guy, Leo, is terrific in detail and longing and perspective. The rest reads like filler - clever filler, but still, the only voice I wanted to hear from was Leo's, and much of the rest is just irritating and so convoluted that it's hard to follow.Book Review: Multi-Literary Styles Bring Life to Tale of Love and Loss
Summary: 5 Stars
A book within a book generally reveals itself as a literary conceit by a writer intent on showing his or her craft to an audience deemed too cynical for more straightforward prose. However, author Nicole Krauss has written an emotionally rich novel that uses this binary structure to illuminate two extremely different interior lives. The first is Leo Gursky, an eighty-year old Jewish man who survived persecution in WWII Poland before moving to New York City, where he leads a sad, involuntarily invisible existence. In the confusion after the war, he lost the great love of his life, as well as the son he never knew, who in turn, has become a famous and respected writer. The other protagonist is a fatherless fifteen-year old named Alma. She was named for a character in the Spanish-language book-within-the-book, "The History of Love", which was a favorite of her parents since her father bought it in South America expressly to give to her mother before his death.
As fate would have it, Alma's mother is asked to translate this book into English, and Alma becomes obsessed with her namesake character. The common thread for both Leo and Alma is that they are each searching for someone - Alma for the inspiration for the character in the book and Leo for his long-lost son. The lives of these characters finally intertwine but not in any predictable way, and much of the credit has to be given to Krauss' creative invention for taking such a daring approach in dealing with a plot device that could have fallen prey to condescending manipulation. What the author does very well is capture the transformative nature of literature in all its variety, whether it takes the form of entries in Alma's diary, letters, lists, translations or excerpts from an autobiography. Krauss uses these distinctive writing styles to define each personality vividly, and she is particularly successful in capturing the loneliness experienced by Leo as he tries to gain others' attention and the insatiable curiosity Alma has for her family background.
Comparisons to Krauss' husband Jonathan Safran Foer's just-published book, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" are inevitable, as both authors incorporate a child's perspective in a world that proves itself too overwhelming to synthesize, and both use WWII Poland as a metaphor for the current sense of chaos and loss of identity. Perhaps because she is not dealing with the weightier implications of 9/11, Krauss is more successful in telling her story, as this may be the best multi-linear book I've read since David Mitchell's masterful "Cloud Atlas" came out last year and nearly won the Booker Prize. Strongly recommended.
Book Review: by and when
Summary: 2 Stars
When you read this book. By tomarrow. If you want to be in the crowd. Literate. Present.
That is how this book is written. With little depth. By tricks and prepositions. And. The. One. Word. Sentence.
Is the
Tone.
Style.
Great?
Yes.
But I would hardly call this a
Good.
Book.
Just
Tricks. Of someone who is not. Too Clever. For me to see. Past.