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: #1187 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Read it!!!
I loved this book! It's sweet and funny and very human. The author has created characters that are so real you feel as if you've known them all your life. The story is captivating -- touching, moving, sad, hopeful, and hard to let go. It's not linear though, so practical types move on. But for the romantics among us, and for anyone who treasures the novel as a literary form, it's beautiful.

His Story of Love !
An incredibly ingenious work of art by a mistress of the written word!

Nicole has excelled in speaking with authenticity be it via Bird, Alma or Leo - characters who are so real & tangible that they break your heart countless times as they share their innermost thoughts & secrets.

This is a 'mystery', a story of love, humanity, childhood, heart break, friendship & deceit. The kind of book that lives on in your memory long after the final page.

Read it!

Tenderly and Beautifully Written
The plot isn't as complicated as it seems, but because the book is told by different narrators, readers may feel perplexed at times. The narrative by the main character, Leo Gursky, the Polish man who lost because of the War by the Nazis his family, the only girl he ever loved and the son who didn't know he existed until after his mother's death, is bleak but brilliant. The one by Alma, the teenage girl who lost her father to pancreatic cancer and was forced to grow up to comfort her deeply depressed mother, is both witty and naughty. And the one by Alma's brother, Bird, who thought he would be the Messiah for the generation, is funny and mischievous. Apparently a highly intelligent author, Nicole Krauss writes with sophistication and tenderness, knitting the different narratives pretty well, though some of the narratives are a bit boring. Some reviewers say they don't like the ending at all, but I love it. Two unrelated individuals of different generations, Leo and Alma, hug and comfort each other in their first encounter because of their shared experience of loss and compassion for each other. The ending scene lingered on my mind for a long time after I finished the last page.