Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing that she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man named Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer.
He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives.
I was confused. But some of my favorite books people say need a reader's guide bigger than the book itself. I don't think this was the case with The History of Love, I read it the same way I did Gravity's Rainbow, i.e. really confused but really engrossed. I kinda got it in the end. But damn...if you are gonna read it...try not to get distracted...it flips around like that 3 foot ocean going salmon you caught once, but no one else was there to see.
A young girl and an old man - both quite oblivious to the existence of the other - form the base for this fantastic book where life and love are intertwined throughout several decades. The author has used quite a few tricks and twists to make this book work, and it does; for instance, skipping between different story-tellers' perspectives, jumping in time, telling different stories starting in the middle: this may make the book sound complex, and it sometimes is, but pays off dearly at the end. It is well-written, quirky and adorable.
A young girl and an old man - both quite oblivious to the existence of the other - form the base for this fantastic book where life and love are intertwined throughout several decades. The author has used quite a few tricks and twists to make this book work, and it does; for instance, skipping between different story-tellers' perspectives, jumping in time, telling different stories starting in the middle: this may make the book sound complex, and it sometimes is, but pays off dearly at the end. It is well-written, quirky and adorable.
A young girl and an old man - both quite oblivious to the existence of the other - form the base for this fantastic book where life and love are intertwined throughout several decades. The author has used quite a few tricks and twists to make this book work, and it does; for instance, skipping between different story-tellers' perspectives, jumping in time, telling different stories starting in the middle: this may make the book sound complex, and it sometimes is, but pays off dearly at the end. It is well-written, quirky and adorable.
I'm quite taken with this book, in fact, maybe I should say I'm stuck on it. The main character, the long-suffering Leopold Gursky, is one of the most endearing characters I've ever met in a novel, and I lingered over his thoughts.
In the beginning, you learn that Leo is completely without family, lives alone in an overstuffed apartment, and has exactly one friend in the world, another eccentric, Bruno. Leo has a fear of dying on a day when he has been unseen by anyone, so he does some rather comical things to make sure that people do notice him. This man doesn't seem to realize just how lonely he is. The heartbreaking part of the story, though, is that before he emigrated from Poland, many years ago, he was an aspiring writer who was in love with a young woman named Alma Mereminski, and after they were separated …
I'm quite taken with this book, in fact, maybe I should say I'm stuck on it. The main character, the long-suffering Leopold Gursky, is one of the most endearing characters I've ever met in a novel, and I lingered over his thoughts.
In the beginning, you learn that Leo is completely without family, lives alone in an overstuffed apartment, and has exactly one friend in the world, another eccentric, Bruno. Leo has a fear of dying on a day when he has been unseen by anyone, so he does some rather comical things to make sure that people do notice him. This man doesn't seem to realize just how lonely he is. The heartbreaking part of the story, though, is that before he emigrated from Poland, many years ago, he was an aspiring writer who was in love with a young woman named Alma Mereminski, and after they were separated by unfortunate events, he wrote a book about his feelings for her.
This is where Krauss's novel turns into a mystery novel. What happened to Gursky's novel? The reader knows that it was published, and in fact the other main character in Krauss's novel is the teenaged Alma Singer, who was named for the Alma in Gursky's novel by her father, who came across The History of Love in an out-of-the-way used bookstore and was quite taken with it.
Got that? Except--I hate it when people review books and say too much, especially when there's a mystery involved, and this one unfolds in an unexpected way. It's not just about the book, but also about Gursky's relations, and how a young girl reaches across a couple generations to piece together an intriguing story, as well as her place in her own story. It's a moving book, and now that I've finished it, I miss it. And yet. I will give up for the next person:)
One interesting little factoid is that the auther, Nicole Krauss, happens to be married to Jonathan Safran Foer.
