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. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2872 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
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
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.

Customer Reviews

The Miraculous Journey of Love and Chance
Nicole Krauss's astonishing novel about a manuscript that survives the Holocaust, a flood, broken friendships, a plagiarist, misunderstanding, and obscurity has all the heart and intelligence of the best fiction being published today. Elderly Leo Gursky is afraid of dying unnoticed, and he plans his days so that people will see him and remember him. Among other schemes, he makes a scene in Starbucks and poses nude for a drawing class. Leo wasn't always this lonely. Decades before, in a small town that was then part of Poland, he fell in love with a girl named Alma. He wrote a book about her before the two fled at different times and circumstances to safety during World War II. Despite the disappointments in his life, Leo continues to write, convinced that he will die when this next book is finished. Meanwhile, a teenager also called Alma, named after a character in a book titled The History of Love by a Chilean named Litvinoff, finds herself in the heart of a mystery: her mother is hired by a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus to translate The History of Love from Spanish. Since Alma's father passed away years before, her mother has been overcome with sadness, and Alma sets out to find Jacob Marcus as a possible suitor. Oblivious to Alma's quest, her brother Bird has decided he is one of thirty-six holy men, a "lamed vovnik", and might even be the Messiah. And then there's Litvinoff himself, in the past, with his personal story and connection to the manuscript and to Alma and to his own beloved Rosa. The stunning coup of this novel is how Krauss brings these diverse elements into a single, concluding moment.

Krauss has complete command of a story that could get away from a lesser novelist. Witty, sometimes sadly funny, with unforgettable off-beat characters, the novel draws in the reader from the first page, although its true strength isn't evident until the last hundred pages. The comparison of The History of Love to Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is inevitable, since the two authors are married and both books were published in 2005. While the two works echo each other in parts, use similar postmodern techniques, and concern themselves with related themes, Krauss and Foer are too good to be lumped together. Still, these seem like companion books. The History of Love is every bit as inventive and as emotionally riveting as Foer's novel - and vice versa - but it (as does Foer's novel) seems to wink at readers who have read both. Readers familiar with Foer's book will smile as Leo reveals that he is a retired locksmith who can open any door he wants. And the set-up of a young person, missing his/her dead father and searching New York for clues to solve a mystery will seem familiar. Beyond that, however, these books stand alone as remarkable works about people, both immigrants and natives, who are adrift in contemporary America.

This exceptional novel deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended.

Brilliant but flawed
This book is very similar in both content and tone to Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's interesting to note that Foer and Krauss are husband and wife.

Summary, no spoilers:

This novel is told from the point of view of several narrators.

The first, and best narrator, (the parts that feature him are brilliant), is Leo Gursky. Leo lives by himself in New York. He was born in Poland, and fell in love with a girl named Alma. They vowed to spend their lives together.

Due to the war, Leo and Alma were separated, and Leo has spent his life alone, pining for Alma.

The other main narrator is a young girl also named Alma, who has lost her father to pancreatic cancer and lives with her young brother and mother. All have been terribly damaged by his death.

Although we occasionally get other narrators, the story is essentially told by these two wounded individuals. Alma tries to find the woman for whom she was named, and Leo tries to become a part of the living world, and become a part of his son Isaac's life. And all of this centers around a mysterious book entitled The History of Love.

This is a gorgeous book. Like Foer's novel, this book is funny, sad, and quirky. At times a bit too quirky.

I thought the chapters involving Leo were terrific. The book starts out with Leo's narration, and hence the book starts out on a powerful note.

Although I enjoyed the character of young Alma, the chapters involving her were often odd, and sometimes slowed the pace of the story.

Still, this book is worthy of 5 stars, and it would make a wonderful book club choice...there is a lot to discuss.

So who has the better book, Foer or Krauss? My vote goes to Krauss, who wrote a page turner that has a better flow, and is more accessible than the Foer's work.

Recommended.

Extremely faithful and incredibly pure
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.