s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > The History of Love

‘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.’

Simply put, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is a deluge of beauty and emotions that will certainly burst through even the strongest levees of hearts. This book is like a warm blanket and cup of tea on a cold, rainy day when you are emotionally exhausted. It is an ode to the human spirit, the will to live, love, survive, and create, even when beleaguered by the horrors of war and chased down by the ticking of time towards inevitable death. The multiple storylines work as commentary upon each other, asking questions on the meaning of authenticity or simply shattered lives seeking solace or a purpose as they try to find ways to love themselves and one another. Spanning decades and spiraling between three primary narratives, this is an emotional epic, an immigrant story, a somber bildungsroman and a metafiction feast that addresses fears of existence while threading hearts and lives together around a single, little-known novel that forever alters each character. And it will most likely change you as well, dear reader.

‘Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.’

Seriously, this book will make you weep. Not just like a few tears, I’m talking I closed the final page full-on, soul cleansing, ugly crying pausing only to laugh at myself and then launch back into the tears. Krauss captures emotional exhaustion and impalpable sadness really well, best embodied in the scenes of the young girl trying to make sense of the world as grief leaves everything feeling bruised around her after the early death of her father. The novel centers on Leo Gursky, a lonely Polish octogenarian living in a small apartment in New York as he awaits his final breath, his only friend being another Polish immigrant who was a childhood friend and now lives above him. He spends each day trying ‘to make a point of being seen,’ not wanting to die on a day nobody had viewed him. It also follows the story of 14 year old Alma Singer as she hunts down the truth about a mysterious novel her mother is translation while also looking for a love interest for said mother. Additionally, we learn the life of that novel’s author, or is he really?

‘A kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination.’

There is a unique flair to each narrative. Leo is written in first person and sways between memory and present, loosely flowing from one to the other. While the rhetorical quirk to add ‘And yet.’ as a declarative after statements gets a bit overused, it is still charming and taps the hopeless-yet-hopeful tone that permeates his sections. The Alma sections, written in quick vignettes, has a nearly Wes Anderson appeal to them with her quirky love of outdoor survival facts and collecting anything that relates to her late father. For the Polish writer Zvi Litvinoff, these sections are told like a sly biography, while the sections about Alma’s brother, Bird, that appear at the end of the novel are written as heart wrenching diary entries as he tries to ‘be normal’ and grapples with his belief of being the Messiah and his love of Jewish tradition. These narratives weave together to become something far greater than the sum of their parts as another patchwork in the history of love, and the reader is keenly aware each has something to do with the other narratives, but even when they eventually conjoin as the connections become apparent, each union sheds light on more truths and beauty that you could ever image.

‘The boy became a man who became invisible. In this way he escaped death.’

Survival is a major theme here and many of the ways this is done is through literature. ‘The truth is a thing I invented so I could live,’ Leo says, and he spends a great deal of the novel writing a book, Words for Everything to push aside his loneliness, tell his truths and ‘because an undescribed world was too lonely.’ As a youth he also wrote, struggling to find a blend between books that were too realistic or overly made-up, struggling to create a perfect world of words to impress the girl of his dreams, a world of words they could live in together. But, alas, they are separated by an ocean and a war when she is able to flee and he must stay behind to survive, a Jew in occupied Poland. This is paralleled with Litvinoff who makes his way to Chile and finds love, a love that wishes to live in his world of words and pushes him to publish a novel, a novel of tenebrous mystery but full of beauty to connect each character.

There is a passage that follows the single copy of the in-novel novel also titled The History of Love from publication, to bookstore shelves, returned to a warehouse, sold to a used book dealer and finally into the hands of Alma’s father. Then gifted to Alma’s mother when the two first meet. It is a scene sure to capture the heart of even a passing hobbyist bibliophile as the origin story for how Alma was named for the many Almas in the novel, something that certainly tugged my heartstrings as the proud father of a little girl I named from a childhood favorite novel. The way Krauss so perfectly examines how literature can uphold a weary heart and leave a lasting mark to glow inside us is just one of many reasons I encourage you to dive into this short novel.

These characters try to prolong life in the words on a page, or to protect a story ‘so that he could buy a little more time.’ When working on his novel, Leo says ‘at times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same,’ believing this act of creation is also keeping him alive. This also gets into the metafictional aspects of the novel, as the reader will soon learn the origins of The History of Love and the mysterious patron asking for an English translation of it are a much more complicated and tragic affair than initially thought, and the ‘final chapter’ appears in many layered forms in this book.

‘She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.’


Learning to live with difficult truths is central to each character, each having experienced a great loss. Or, as Krauss writes they ‘learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.’ There is the loss of love, the loss of one’s country, the loss of a parent, the loss of innocence, and the great loss of time and what might have been. Leo must watch his son grow up never knowing who his real father is, making for some of the most tenderly sad moments in the book as Leo spins Dylan and Beatles records hoping to catch the music of the day his son might enjoy. ‘Perhaps that is what it means to be a father —to teach your child to live without you,’ he ponders, ‘if so, no one was a greater father than I.’ While Leo passes towards the end of life without his son, Alma passes into maturity without a father. A loss that is felt in every aspect of her life and self-confidence. Her near-romance falters, her family is in a state of melancholy, her Uncle’s marriage is falling apart, her brother is the local oddball, nothing seems to be going well and her attempts to find a lover for her grieving mother becomes an obsession to discover the origins of Alma if only to give herself a purpose.

‘It’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway around the world, only this was the opposite of disaster.’

This quest becomes an act of love that ripples far beyond her. Similarly, Leo recounts how he was spared death when hiding in hay from Nazis as the German soldiers were to preoccupied over one’s wife accusing him of infidelity to properly inspect the barn. ‘By accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace,’ he contemplates of the soldier’s wife, ‘and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.’ Krauss deftly recreates this sort of butterfly effect through the experimental nature of her novel, which I felt manages to avoid feeling gimmicky by passing tremendous emotional weight and resonance through each stitching as the disparate elements are pulled together to the absolutely heartbreaking and life affirming conclusion. The two taps that meant ‘I’m alive’ when Leo knocks on his radiator each night return in one of the most touching scenes I’ve ever read that ties a brilliant emotive bow to the end of the book. (view spoiler)[Discovering Bruno was a product of his imagination all along was also a massive kick right to the heart. It was well earned but I’m glad it was only softly mentioned and brushed aside quickly, being just another element of the beauty rather than being relied upon as a twist to uphold the ending. (hide spoiler)]. Krauss knows how to end on a high note and not linger.

This is a talent Krauss has, as there are many beautiful moments that she doesn’t dwell on and instead allows to resonate inside you as you sort through them. When the Uncle tries to explain his fraught relationship, for example, he begins explaining a painting he loves before losing the thread of what he was getting at. We watch him go from an abstract connection from the heart into a cerebral examination of the painting only to find, from that perspective, the initial emotional connection is ineffable. I also find it moving in a way that can’t be contained by words how the written love for Alma survives not only decades but also translation and medium, going from ink and paper in Yiddish to being published in Spanish and later digitized on a computer when being translated again into English. The beauty of these moments is like a butterflies wings, gorgeous but turns to dust if you try to touch them or cage them into explanation.

‘An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.’

When a good friend said this was a favorite book last summer, I knew I had to read it. It seemed destined to work for me, especially as the product of Polish immigrants and a fan of all the authors name dropped throughout the book (Bruno Schulz and Nicanor Parra for instance) but I still didn’t expect it to hit me this hard. It is a heavy book with a somber tone that really seeps in as you read it and pulls you into the character's respective griefs. But it is also quite funny at times. Most importantly, Krauss pulls it all off. War is tragic, and this was difficult to read as we are all watching another if only in our news feeds and this book is a reminder that even the survivor’s lives are often scattered across the earth like fragments from a blast. Thankfully we have literature to find each other, to have voices heard, to connect, to share, and to love. And for that I will always be thankful for literature. I could rave about this book all day and it’s multi-layered goodness, but I’ve already taken up too much of your time and you should just pick this up and read it.

5/5

‘And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.’