Book #128: The History of Love

Title: The History of Love
Author: Nicole Krauss

I loved Nicole Krauss's The Great House so much that I had to read The History of Love too. As an MFA student, I've decided that the author whose style I'd most like to emulate is Nicole Krauss. I also know that it's probably an impossibility for me to write like her. Krauss's narratives are circuitous-- in this novel she has at least four narrators telling different stories, and like The Great House, the stories eventually wind together in the end (this time a little more neatly than The Great House-- it almost had a quasi-surreal feeling like The Shadow of the Wind-- though maybe I'm just reacting to the Spanish-speaking bent in both works). My writing isn't like that-- people always tell me it's clean and straightforward, and maybe I should work with my strengths, but I'd like to write my way out of a puzzle sometime.

In The History of Love we read about Leo Gursky, a retired locksmith who never married after the love of his life, Alma, moved to America at the start of WWII. Gursky hid out in the early days of the war, writing about his love for Alma, but once he finally managed to get his manuscript in the safekeeping of a friend and emigrate to the United States, he discovered not only that Alma had borne him a child, but that she'd also married another man. Gursky spends many years pining for Alma. Meanwhile, his story finds its way to publication, and inspires other writers and lovers around the world, including the parents of Alma Singer, who makes it her mission to find the author of the book. It's a complicated, beautiful, dreamlike story-- one that requires some concentration at times, but definitely rewards the effort.