A Little History of Love

The fact that Nicole Krauss, a young novelist with only one book behind her, has attempted to carry off this feat is, if nothing else, testament to her bravery. We first meet Leo Gursky when he believes he is nearing the end of his life, living alone in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. He is an elderly Jew who came to America from Poland after the second world war, having survived the Holocaust in hiding, "mostly in trees, but also cracks, cellars, holes". Gursky is terrified of dying on a day when nobody has noticed him, which drives him to mildly attention-seeking behaviour - dropping his change in a shop, say.

Although he seems to be a man without much of a life, we soon learn that he was once rich in art and love. He loved a woman, Alma, in Poland, but because he took too long to get to America she married somebody else. He also wrote a great novel in Poland, The History of Love, but entrusted it to a friend who later told him that it was lost. So the Holocaust allowed him to survive, but without the core of himself, and it seems that all we see is the husk of the man, withered and waiting for death.

We soon move from Gursky's empty little apartment to a more lively home, a family where a widowed mother, Charlotte, is bringing up a young boy and a year-old girl who was named Alma after the heroine of a book her father loved. Gursky's novel was not lost. Thanks for the wonderful story also including the young children trying to find peace in their father's death at a young age. Your heart breaks for them searching for love. I appreciate the way you tied it all together with the "history of love".

This book was quite confusing read on a Kindle app for iPhone. There are different writers voices and I suspect that in the hard copy there is some way to tell which one is writing but on the Kindle app they all appear the same so it is totally confusing as to who it is who is speaking and from where and what time period. I got pretty much confused and tired of trying to figure it out so I decided to quit half way. It might be much more interesting if one could keep things straight. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about its premise.

All I knew was that it is highly regarded by many of my Goodreads friends. What you should know is that right after I finished reading it, I spent the rest of the day rereading and underlining passages and clues I might have overlooked. Did you find yourself doing the same thing after watching The Sixth Sense for the first time? This book is a compelling, heartwarming study of loneliness, loss and adolescence. At least ten to fifteen characters are inadvertently drawn together by a book published soon after World War II called The History of Love. The mystery behind its author and publication, and the different lives it touches up to present day unfold in a series of personal journal entries.

Not enough to cry, but enough to remind me that I am human, and that we all have personal circumstances that we're struggling to overcome. Sometimes one good day in a gloomy month is so precious that we dread the setting of the sun. The more I think about it, the more questions I have. Love is such a complex thing, whether it's fufilled, reciprocated, or never comes to fruition That is pretty powerful, and Krauss did a magnificent job of relaying that message.

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Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. The mystery behind its author and publication, and the different lives it touches up to present day unfold in a series of personal journal entries. Not enough to cry, but enough to remind me that I am human, and that we all have personal circumstances that we're struggling to overcome.

Sometimes one good day in a gloomy month is so precious that we dread the setting of the sun. The more I think about it, the more questions I have. Love is such a complex thing, whether it's fufilled, reciprocated, or never comes to fruition That is pretty powerful, and Krauss did a magnificent job of relaying that message.

View all 32 comments. This book is all about words — words written, words unwritten, words spoken, words unspoken, words imagined, words deleted, words carried, words discarded, words believed, words treasured. Does that make the book complex? Oh no, no; it makes it magical. Magic, as I see, is a beautiful truth suddenly broken to us. Leopold Gursky is a recluse years old Jewish Man of Polish origin, presently residing in America in a quiet neighbourhood whose silence is splintered by his only and eccentric childhood friend, Bruno.

Having lost in love 60 years ago, he has survived most of his life drinking the fleeting images of his son, Isaac a famous writer , from afar. His only wish now — his son reads the manuscript his scrawny fingers have jabbed on the typewriter in the past few years post a heart attack. In the same country but another world, lives the curious and awkward year old Alma Singer who is trying hard to reignite the love her mother has relinquished after losing her husband to cancer.

When a letter arrives one day from a certain Mr. As I read page after page, the sentiments seeped into the words became clearer — like some kind of a haze that one slowly peels off a window, one brush at a time. And the scenery that emerged as a result, was a gossamer of young dreams and old lessons, assimilating into each other to keep the magic called love , alive.

It is the bird that flutters on many windows but settles on that one which shelters it across all seasons. The exchanges between friends, the response to tragedy, the adrenaline rush to fight impersonation, the willingness to sacrifice, the aspiration to pull off the unthinkable - the delightful narrative arc contained these themes with a mystery angle on one side and a biblio-slant on the other. And this approach imparted such a refreshing suppleness to the story that when the finale played out, I was transported to the venue and was made to feel completely at home. View all 48 comments.

Sep 11, Jon rated it really liked it. How about the history of me bawling my face off. View all 3 comments. Oct 29, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing Shelves: I'll read it again!!!!!! Mar 05, Christy rated it really liked it Shelves: What I like about Krauss's novel.

Leo Gursky's melancholy, lonely presence.

The History of Love: Nicole Krauss: www.newyorkethnicfood.com: Books

The sections of the novel told from his perspective are hauntingly beautiful. Alma's precocious teenager voice. Her voice is less compelling for me than that of Leo Gursky, but still good. The slow development of the connections between Leo, Alma, Zvi Litvinoff, Isaac, and the book The History of Love , in terms not only of plot but of theme. What is mildly irritating about the book. Leo's habit of saying "And yet. Each of her sections of the book is written in list form. It gets old after a while, even though it's an interesting conceit. The introduction of Bird, Alma's brother, as a new narrator in the last 30 or so pages of the novel.

I would've preferred Krauss to find another narrative device or incorporate him more fully into the rest of the book. What I am not sure about yet The structure of the ending. Bringing Alma and Leo's narrative voices together in alternating pages is a neat trick, but it involves a rather major shift in tone and pacing. Here, suddenly, we are moving forward in what is essentially real time and are given only short sections of each narrative voice at a time. The content of the ending. Without giving much away here, I will say that the concluding scene felt as if it wanted to be deep and meaningful, but was rather hollow instead.

There is one major revelation, but it is not one that takes on the relationship between Leo and Alma either Alma.

The History of Love

The reader is left hanging regarding Leo and Alma as well as Leo and his book s. What else to say Despite my hesitations about the end of the novel, it gets four stars for its compelling characters and its ability to create a mood through the development of those characters. I began this book at about 11 pm, thinking I would get a jump on it before finishing it tomorrow, but it is now 3: I did not want to stop reading it and couldn't put it down until I reached the ending.

Perhaps it is that ability to draw the reader in and make her read well past her bedtime in anticipation that makes the lightweight ending so disappointing. View all 10 comments. Jan 01, Maede rated it really liked it Shelves: Jan 25, Erin rated it it was ok Shelves: This book was promising at the beginning, but proceeded to get sloppy and puzzling, and then ended in an unsatisfying and unclear way. It's a convoluted plot involving a Polish Jew who falls completely for a childhood girlfriend, writes a book about her, and then is separated from both by the Holocaust.

Not knowing the book was eventually published by the friend to whom he gave it for safekeeping, he now lives his old age in New York, lonely and waiting to die. His story is interwoven with that This book was promising at the beginning, but proceeded to get sloppy and puzzling, and then ended in an unsatisfying and unclear way. His story is interwoven with that of the friend who took the book and published it under his own name, and a young girl in New York who was named after the heroine of the book and goes searching for her namesake.

The chapters involving Leo, the author of the book, are well written and intriguing, very well I imagine reflecting the mindset and cranky humor of an old codger. The chapters about Alma, the namesake, are short, choppy, and disjointed, often going off on tangents that don't seem to have much to do with the plot. Then towards the end of the book, we all of a sudden start getting chapters written as diary entries of Alma's little brother. The odd change in format is an interruption to the flow, as is the final part of the book in which Alma and Leo finally meet; the POV switches rapidly back and forth between them, which I found slightly irritating.

The ending was a bit of a let down after all of the buildup--perhaps I am not smart enough to understand it. View all 19 comments. Krauss excels in writing rich believable characters. The soft down of your white hair lightly playing about your scalp like a half-blown dandelion. Many times I have been tempted to blow on your head and make a wish. Only a last scrap of decorum keeps me from it. His obsession with dying, his pining over lost love. A good day for Leo involves some quality pigeon-watching time interspersed with fantasizing about his upcoming funeral.

Make a few friends? As soon as the acne cleared my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face. Point is, it improves on reflection. And while no one who didn't experience it 1st hand could ever begin to comprehend what a Holocaust survivor must feel, I caught a glimmer. Enough to understand - Leo was so wounded that he was incapable of change. Want to thank Arnie for his review - the little nudge I needed: Hope you will read it to. View all 43 comments. Jan 04, Anuradha rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: I dedicate this review to the wonderful woman who graced the pages of Goodreads under the pen name of Fatty Bolger.

It was her evocative and emotional review that drove me to pick up this magnum opus. Quoting from the book, I think it is pertinent for me to say about Krauss, what she says about Isaac Mortiz, "To call him her a Jewish writer or, worse, an experimental writer, is to miss entirely the point of his her humanity, which resisted all categorization. I studied Sociology for three years, and one of the techniques, I remember my professor telling me, to study Sociology is Verstehen.

Google defines it as an "empathic understanding of human behaviour", but somehow, I prefer my professor's definition of it. She called it "putting yourself into the shoes of the person you study. She said it was important, as a student of sociology to understand that the subject cannot be studied unless you feel for the societal subjects you are studying. I do have a point; I'm getting to it. Krauss is a flawless storyteller, and this is evident especially when she switches between chapters, each chapter written from the perspective of a different person.

She perfectly manages to capture the love, the loss, the longing of Leo Gursky, an eighty-year old man, who has been alone, pining for the only woman, the only person whose opinion mattered, for a period of sixty years. A man waiting for his death, a man who knows that some day, very soon, his heart, his weakest part, will give out.

She also seamlessly, in the next chapter, switches her tone to fit the voice of Alma Singer, a rather smart fifteen year old with a slow brother and a depressed mother. Alma Singer, who despite having lost her father hasn't lost her youth, or her drive to live. It's almost as if the division between the two chapters is a mirror; a mirror separating the youthful joy of Alma Singer from the aged indifference of Leo Gursky. About The History of Love. The only person whose opinion he cared about. When they were ten he asked her to marry him.

When they were eleven he kissed her for the first time. When they were fifteen she showed him the scar on her left breast. Their love was a secret they told no one. He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. What if I die? For her sixteenth birthday he gave her an English dictionary and together they learned the words. What kind of word is that? When they were seventeen they made love for the first time, on a bed of straw in a shed. Later—when things happened that they could never have imagined—she wrote him a letter that said: After all, it was his love for her that saved him.

It is true that the love turned into loss. Because sometimes the things that are hardest to do, are the things that have to be done. But still, the pride that your legacy still lives on, in the guise of what you wanted to be, what you intended to be. That pride may save you. I interned at The Hindu about two and a half years ago, sometime in Winter Three of my articles got published with the by-line. It wasn't an achievement for me.

My mother has framed photos of the article in her Office. Because small as this may have seemed to me, no one was prouder of me than my parents. Isaac Mortiz may have been a best-selling author; no one loved his stories more than his father did. Unknown to his son, unseen to the world, Leo Gursky was a proud father. And when his son dies, unknown to his father, unexpectedly, Leo's world crashes.

Because, really, does he have anything else to live for? The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that leans always to the left. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

Has the dubious distinction of dealing with her depressed, aloof mother, and her rather slow, yet unflinchingly fanatical brother. A brother who jumped off the roof of his school, because he thought he could fly. A girl, looking to find someone for her mother, so that she could explore the Arctic. A girl who believed that Alma was a real person, indeed. A girl who memorised the Universal Edibility Test. A girl who fell in love with her best friend, but was too awkward to tell him so.

A girl, whose story almost mirrored Leo's in so many ways. She has second chances.

Zvi Litvinoff, who did everything he did for love. A tale of love, loss, and longing. How many times have we heard that before, you say? Only difference is, The History of Love deals with these in a ponderous, emotionally draining manner, that leaves you longing for more. The subtle elements of humour in it make it the brilliant book it is.

View all 34 comments. Jun 07, BlackOxford rated it really liked it Shelves: Being Moved If you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer. I mean no disparagement by saying that nobody does Holocaust survivor-tragedy better than she. The old man in the empty Manhattan apartment whose pregnant Polish sweetheart had left him years ago for America, and whose closest contact with his son is at the son's wake is tragedy with punch.

As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relatio Being Moved If you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer. As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relationship with yet another survivor-figure who is obsessed with the work of an obscure South American poet he a betrayer-survivor.

Identities blur and flow into one another until the reveal becomes complete. The way human beings deal with chance, particularly the randomness of death, and the role of the long-term tragedy of chance itself become pitiable. With her remarkable skill, Krauss entraps I have no better word the reader into her emotional universe. Her oeuvre is emotion and as one of her characters says, "The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible. View all 18 comments.

Apr 10, Algernon rated it it was amazing Shelves: Words are the way we fight against entropy, against forgetfullness, the way we demonstrate to the world and to ourselves that we are alive, that we have a past and a future. History is the act of connecting the past with the future, and Nicole Krauss argues that the way we love is a better "For My Grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing and For Jonathan, my life.

History is the act of connecting the past with the future, and Nicole Krauss argues that the way we love is a better measure of our lives than wars or industrial revolutions or politics. Three separate strands are woven together in the novel. At first, they seem unrelated, and much of the plot is driven by the effort of a young girl named Alma Singer to find the connections between her own family history, a book called "The History of Love" written decades ago in Chile by a Polish immigrant, and a mysterious man who pays a lot of money for a translation of that book, now quasy forgotten.

Also forgotten, living alone in an apartment filled with junk, is an 80 year old man named Leopold Gursky, who is afraid nobody will notice or care when he passes away. I could start now to explain and to analyze the structure of the book, or the motivations of the characters, or the style of presentation. But I have a feeling that in doing so, I will do a disservice to the story, because this gem is one of those rare magic moments where you feel that instead of you reading a novel, the book is reading you, and putting down in words what you wished you had been able to do or write about your own life as Alma father's remarks in the dedication he writes on the first page of the book.

This novel might as well be about my own grandparents and father, who died while I was still a young punk, too obsessed with myself to ask for the stories of their youth, for their histories of love. Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear and distant.

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Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are like photographs of photographs. I admire Alma Singer for her efforts to keep the memory of her father alive, re-reading his books on survival in the wilderness and on edible plants, inventing stories about him to tell to her small brother, pestering her grieving mother to rebuilt her life.

Alma is also a teenager, so she has to cope with her own emerging feelings of love. Did I tell she also worships Antoine de Saint-Exupery? That's just one more reason to like her chapters, and the lively entries she makes in her personal diary. Yet the character I identified with most is the old Leo Gursky, the invisible man, who feels the need to drop things in the supermarker or quarell with the chashiers, even goes to pose nude for a class of art students, just to feel that somebody is noticing him, that somebody might remember him.

Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. If you don't know what Leo is talking about, I envy you, but there is more to him than meets the eye. Behind the decrepit facade and the cranky behaviour beats a heart still believing that life is "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever". In the silence of his room, he still puts words on paper, pouring out his passion and his pain, even if nobody seems interested in reading his novel. You see, he was not always 80 years old, and he can still remember the best years of his life: Once upon a time there was a boy.

He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond.

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A tree a castle. Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across a field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games.

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She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair. Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. I feel like there's nothing more to add after the last passage, without spoiling the magic. Yet, I must comment on the people disappearing from Leo and from the other people's life, because the reason the village, the houses and the fields are gone, the reason Leo and Zvi and many others are living in exile has to do with the crimes of the Nazis in the second world war.

The plea against disappearance in the dedication is now extended to all the victims of the Holocaust, whose shadow is still looming over the younger generations. Nicole Krauss does a much more creditable effort in dealing with this highly charged event that the dissapointingly cute "Book Thief". She keeps the dignity of her people with understated intensity, and matter of fact enumeration of the many holes left in the personal and cultural space by the departed. A Book Within a Book Who really wrote the book of love? Leo or Zvi or even Alma in her vivid imagination?

Better yet, was it started centuries or millenia ago, and passed on from generation to generation until it landed in my hands? Is the novel published in Valparaiso still lingering on some dusty shelves in a dark second-hand bookshop that hardly anyone visits today, in the age of electronic purchases? Is there a copy of it to be found in the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona? Speaking of ages, we only get to read fragments of this fabled history, more like short essays on the ways love as the highest art of communication between people, the way we are recognized and remembered.

I have tried to bookmark some of these favorite passages regarding The Age of Glass, The Age of Silence, The Birth of Feeling, but I realized I should really quote whole pages, take them out of context, and that they are better left alone, to be enjoyed the way the author meant them to be, slipped between the memories of Leo and Alma. Even so, here's a sample of what I'm talking about: The first language humans had was gestures.

There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: Holding hands for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's to dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood.

To close my review of a novel I plan to give as a gift to my friends, one that I look forward with great pleasure as a re-read at some point in the future, I have chosen the words of one of the fictional historians.

Did the book change my own life, as Zvi hoped for? Only time will tell. Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all. He couldn't have known it, but [ View all 33 comments.

If the opportunity to read this book in one sitting would have been available to me, I probably would have taken it. I suppose that is what retirement will be for.

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I really loved this book. The characters spoke to me and If the opportunity to read this book in one sitting would have been available to me, I probably would have taken it. The characters spoke to me and they became real, flesh and blood people. Sometimes non-linear storylines bother me. I kept reading to find out what it all meant. I kept reading to be surprised--and I was, pleasantly so. There are three concurrent storylines: Alma Singer is a teen girl, living with her mother and younger brother. Her father had died of cancer when she was a child. Her brother suspects he could be the messiah and her mother is still mourning the loss of her husband and has shown no interest in dating or ever marrying again.

Litvinoff is dead before the beginning of the novel so the portions of his story are told posthumously. It was very touching. View all 8 comments. Dec 27, K. Absolutely rated it liked it Recommended to K. It is not hard to like this book. The writing is stylish. This is basically a love story between two young lovers in Poland. They get separated because the father of the girl sends her to America not knowing that she is pregnant with a child. The young boy follows the girl to America only to find out that she is already married and the child does not know that he is the father.

So, the poor man, L It is not hard to like this book. So, the poor man, Leo Gursky lives all his life watching his girlfriend, Alma Meriminski and their son Isaac Moritz from the distance until they both die and Leo has no other reason to live. That's the first POV. The second and third POVs are those of two siblings Alma and Bird Singer whose father gives their mother a copy of the book that is written by the old man first POV while he is a young man in Poland. The fourth POV is an unnamed narrator telling us that the old man has a friend, Zvi Litvinoff who becomes the author of the former's book.

But I will not tell you how the lives of these 4 narrators or POVs are interwoven or intersect because that is too much of a spoiler. In fact, the slow revelation of the clues or filling up of the blanks is the best deal this book offers. Well, of course, aside from the distinct voices of each narrator that make the reading quite a pleasurable experience.

My first personal complaint is that this slow revelation, tease if I may, became dragging and repetitive especially during the second half of the book. So, while on that part, I was asking myself if Krauss had no other things in mind for her characters to do other than to make them wallow in their loneliness. It is too depressing I twice had to check if the author of the book was not Jodi Piccoult.

I mean, life is not all about sadness, day-in, day-out, right? Even when my father died in , after a few days, because all of us siblings were in town, we went to a karaoke bar and sang the night away because my US navy brother was about to leave the next day. So, even if my dad was buried just two days ago, we had to give our brother a happy moment to remember during his visit because he only sees us once in every 10 years or so.

My second personal complaint is that there is a big similarity between Krauss' style of writing here and that of her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close like the almost empty pages and the young person searching for something. Here that young person is Anna Singer and she is looking for a woman called Alma Meriminski while in Foer's novel it is a young boy looking for the door that can be opened by a key.

Had I not read Foer's first, I would have liked this book better. I am not against writing couples to compare notes but I hope they still maintain their own different styles so they don't appear as buy-one, take-one kind of thing. For example, some characters in the novels of Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt may have that shade of detective mystery but all the other aspects of their novels are different. I have read 4 books by Auster and 2 by Hustvedt and they are among my favorite living novelists. Well, this is my first Krauss and Incredibly was my first by Foer and it might be still too early to say but right now, I have no urge of picking my second book by Krauss unlike when I read my first Hustvedt that the next time I was in a bookstore I bought another book by her and started reading it upon coming back home.

Just two small complaints.