Carolyn’s CBR4 Review#4: The History of Love
It’s hard not to compare Nicole Krauss’s “The History of Love” to her husband Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities while reading Krauss’s book even though I didn’t learn until later that they were married. Both books feature a precocious youth who set out in New York City on a quest. Both youths lost a parent. Both feature old men who experienced World War 2 (A Holocaust survivor in Krauss and a Dresden bombing survivor in Safran Foer) who recently lost a son. And both books share unusual typography and references to canonical literary figures and Jewish myth and magical realism. Obviously both books deserve to be criticized on their own merit, but in the inevitable comparison between husband and wife, Krauss’s “History of Love” is something special.
“The History of Love” is about a manuscript that survives the Holocaust, a flood, broken friendships, a plagiarist, misunderstanding, and obscurity and three people, whose connection to each other remains unclear until the end of the book. 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. When he arrived in New York to reunite with the girl he loves, he finds her married and the son he didn’t know he had being raised by another man. Zvi Litvinoff is Polish man who immigrated to Chile during the war and published a book called, “The History of Love.” Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer (named after every female character in Litvinoff’s book) 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 is a lamed vovnick, one of the 36 righteous Jewish souls born into every generation. To explain their connection would spoil the entire book.
The book really soars when it focuses on Leo Gursky who is so scared of being invisible that he deliberately makes scenes in grocery stores and poses nude for art classes. At the core of his self is the pain of only knowing his son from a distance and the reality that he is a stranger to his only child. The sections about Alma are interesting although often fall into the tired prodigious child category (much like Oscar in “Extremely Loud”). But it is a fantastic book; the moment I finished the book, I flipped to the front and started again. Everyone should read this truly unique book about love, loss, language and people adrift in contemporary America.
Cannonball Read IV 