The History of Love
Book | Nicole Krauss
Love and literature are the life-blood of this remarkable novel.
New Yorker Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is, in many ways, the history of another book whose title is also The History of Love—the work of WWII refugee Leo Gursky who escaped Poland and settled in America. What Gursky is less able to escape is his love for a woman named Alma, the subject of his book. We enter his life sixty years after the Holocaust when he is a lonely old man in New York. Meanwhile, one borough away, a lonely young girl named after Gursky's great love hopes to cure her widowed mother of sadness with the only tool in her arsenal: Gursky's book The History of Love. If this sounds like a sappy book-club doozy, it's not. For every foray into romanticism, the author provides a moment of Metamucil-induced comic relief, and when Gursky isn't battling his digestive system, Alma is engaging in some comedy-of-errors communication with her Russian émigré friend Misha. With a poet's fine-toothed attention to language, Krauss intertwines literature and love, and in her History, both become survival mechanisms providing reasons to hope—and thus, to live.
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