Bookchat: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Welcome to Bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

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Some books arrive in your life simply – a title or a cover illustration catches your eye in a book store, your finger turns over a couple of pages for your eyes to skim, and you buy it. Or a friend tells you “You’re going to love this book” and thrusts it into your hands. Or you read a book review, and the reviewer stirs your interest.

For me, this book started as part of a puzzle. I write a women’s history series here at DK, which only a few enthusiasts read, but I’ve been doing it for over six years now. Because I’m fascinated by all the women I’ve mostly never heard of, women who have nevertheless overcome all the gender bias to succeed at what they wanted to do.

I was working on a post for the series in August when I found what I thought at first was a mistake on my part.  

On August 17, 1970, there was an entry for Nicola Kraus, American novelist.

And on August 18, 1974, there was an entry for Nicole Krauss, American writer and novelist.  

Now I make typos and spelling mistakes all the time, and transpose numbers – fortunately I have an enthusiastic proof-reader who saves me a lot of embarrassment – but for me to enter a person twice with the name spelled two different ways AND the day AND the year also not matching? That’s a lot of wrong, even for me.

However, I wasn’t wrong.

There is a writer named Nicola Kraus who was born on August 17, 1970, and there is a different writer named Nicole Krauss who was born on August 18, 1974.

And I wasn’t the only one who was confused. Somebody else had attributed a quote written by Nicole Krauss to Nicola Kraus, and I had been about to make the same mistake, but it seemed to me highly unlikely that the following two quotes had been written by the same person:

Nicola Krauss co-wrote The Nanny Diaries with Emma McLaughlin, and this is a quote from that book:

And here is the quote that was mistakenly attributed to Nicola:

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This was how The History of Love by Nicole Krauss came into my life. It turned out to be a very fitting introduction.

Because nothing about The History of Love is straightforward. If there were such a thing as a Literary School of Yiddish-Influenced-English Magical Realism, Nicole Krauss would be its most famous author.

“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.”

There are two main characters.

Leopold Gursky, an old Jewish retired locksmith in New York, is the sole survivor of the day in July 1941 when the Nazis shot everyone who was in his village of Slonim. He survived because his mother sent him to hide in the forest. The only other people still living who were from Slonim hadn’t been there that day – they had already left home to find work or go to school elsewhere, or they had emigrated to the Americas.

LEO:

“I try to make a point of being seen.”

(snip)

“If the store is crowded I’ll even go
so far as dropping my change all
over the floor, the nickels and
dimes skidding in every direction.
I’ll get down on my knees. It’s a
big effort for me to go down on
my knees, and an even bigger
effort to get up. And yet. Maybe
I look like a fool.”

(snip)

“All I want is to not die on a day
when I went unseen.”

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Alma Singer is a teenage girl, also living in New York, who is also telling us her life story, and the story of her parents and her younger brother:

ALMA:

“When I was born my mother named
me after every girl in a book my father
gave her called The History of Love.”

(snip)

“My mother, who is English, met him
while she was working on a kibbutz
not far from Ashdod, the summer
before she started Oxford. He was
ten years older than she was.”

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Her father died when Alma was seven. She is the one holding her mother and brother together, struggling to make the family all look “normal” to others, even though none of them are.

If I told you how the rest of the book goes, it might sound like the most depressing book ever written, but it’s often very funny, even when it’s also breaking your heart.

This is the opening of one of the excerpts from the book called The History of Love which appear at intervals in this novel which is also called The History of Love:

“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. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.”

It takes almost the whole novel for the paths of Leo and Alma to finally meet, but they are both seeking answers to questions that make that meeting inevitable. The journeys you have taken with them to get there have been well worth the taking.

As you can probably tell, this is a very difficult book to describe without ruining it.

So just pretend that I’m that friend who told you “You’re going to love this book” and then thrust it into your hands.

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