The History of Love

The History of Love is an unusual novel. Not just a story, but also a creative work of art that supplies the reader with pages that they cannot stop reading. Nicole Krauss writing takes many forms, whether it is a list, a page with two sentences on it, or a long drawn out story retold by a character. It is not a novel that can be explained simply, because it has connections too significant to be summarized into a few words. It was written from multiple points of views, with several intriguing stories occurring simultaneously but in different places. The novel follows two characters specifically: Leopold Gursky and Alma Singer.
First, there is the infamous Leopold Gursky, who can be characterized by the way he believes his obituary will read: “LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT” (3). An elderly man who is up to his eyebrows in belongings from his past, he cannot help but wonder “who will be the last person to see me alive.” Leopold, most commonly known as Leo or Gursky, makes sure that someone notices him. Whether it is the art students who draw as he poses nude for them, or the man who sees him drop everything in his hands, someone, somewhere, everyday sees Leo. Everyday brings with it the fear that death is right around the corner and the feeling that Leo’s life will not have been significant. This fear spurs him to demand something out of everyday life. He is all about surviving, just making it through the day and through the spontaneous events that challenge his life. As the author of a little know book, The History of Love, Leo ponders day in and day out if anyone ever read the one thing that he believes would make his life count for something.
Next comes Alma. “When [Alma] was born [her] mother named [her] after every girl in a book [Alma’s] father gave her called The History of Love.” With her father dead, and the rest of her family wounded by the death, Alma wants to bring peace to her world. She spends her time looking for a way to quench her mother’s loneliness, and figures that only the book from her father can cure the disease. When her mother receives a letter from a man named Jacob Marcus asking her to translate the text into English, she is thrilled and happiness strikes in Alma’s home. It later turns out that this Jacob Marcus connects the only owner of The History of Love, Alma, with its original author, Leo Gursky. While neither of them is knowledgeable of their connection, it does not take long for everything to flow into its place.
Although Alma’s brother Bird dictates scattered portions of the novel, it is predominantly told from the perspective of the two connected individuals. It is told in succession with every other chapter being told from the other person. Between Alma doing everything she can to discover the woman she is named after, the same woman from Gursky’s The History of Love, and Leo trying to become a part of his son’s life, there is one person who realizes the connection that these two individuals share. The middleman per say, plays a large role in the outcome of the novel during the uniting of the “lost and wounded” narrators. The final pages end on a happy note, one I felt worthy of the phrase “Happily Ever After”. Although neither of the two found what they were looking for, they found each other and a connection to what they sought after.
Previously a poetry scholar, Nicole Krauss was born in 1974 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Stanford, graduated and went on to receive a degree from Oxford University. Krauss wrote The History of Love in 2005 after writing her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room in 2002.
I greatly enjoyed Nicole Krauss’s novel and found it to be a page turning, never-ending surprise. It grabbed my attention and I was distraught at the end for no other reason than that I was finished reading. There were no pages left to explore the intricate lives of Alma and Gursky, no more pages to hear about the ridiculous behavior of Bird, or about Bruno, Gursky’s best friend. The book was over and I would not be able to indulge in the lives of these characters any longer.