The History of Love

Life is unfair, life is cruel, that should be the lesson taken away by Leo Gursky, a Polish Holocaust survivor, but the lesson he seems to have taken instead is that once there was love and that is sometimes enough. His love centers around the girl he loved in Poland, Alma Mereminski, the woman for whom he wrote a book, The History of Love.

This book influences a number of lives, including that of a young girl who is also named Alma because her father found the book in a store in Buenos Aires and it changed his life. Our Alma struggles with her own questions about life, the loss of her father, the continued depression of her mother, the coping mechanisms of her strange little brother, Bird. In mysterious and compelling ways, a group of show more lives become entangled in this love story and we readers are left to sort out the truth from the fiction and sort the pieces into a puzzle that makes sense.

I will admit to feeling lost a couple of times, wondering if I had missed something, but like a good mystery, this story unravels in stages and all comes together by the end. It is masterfully woven, deeply personal, highly emotional. Krauss imagines real people, gives them breath and feeling. I cannot imagine anyone reading this novel with indifference.

In addition to a superb story, Krauss has a lot to say about subjects that have meaning for all of us. Life, death, love, connection, separation, loss, depression. She is a student of the human heart.

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn’t find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.

And she has the power to produce an image that is palpable:

The War ended. Bit by bit, Litvinoff learned what had happened to his sister Miriam, and to his parents, and to four of his other siblings (what had become of his oldest brother, Andre, he could only piece together from probabilities). He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face.

She does not describe the horror of the camps, we get no stories of the atrocities, there is no dwelling on the death or destruction; and yet we feel the horror of it, the irreversibility, the calamity of lives lost and the loneliness and desperation of the life that remains.

I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh--someone who knew someone told me he’d last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I’d taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else’s. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that someplace along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?

The events of this book do not take place in the War, but the War looms in the background and we know that without it all of these lives would have taken a different path. There only one thing that is carried out of that war-torn world, and that is the love. None of the love is lost. But the pain that arises from the love might be the sharpest pain of all.

I do wish there was a button for novels that exceed the greatest expectation, but all there is to distinguish this from any other five-star novel is my favorites folder. So, in it goes. If you have not read it, don’t miss it.

Finally, a thank you to Elyse, who told me more than once that I “needed” to read this. Ah, Elyse, how wise you are. show less

To paraphrase author Merritt Tierce, this is a book that made a wound and then stitched it up. It made my heart ache. Krauss really captures in small thoughts and gestures the depth of tenderness Leo feels for the love of his life Alma, for his friend Bruno, and especially for his son Isaac. It’s a book that truly conveyed all the pain and joy and beauty of love.

And oh my goodness, what a fantastic job narrator George Guidall did on the parts from the POV of Leo Gursky!

Yes, this is about love, but for me, it’s mostly about writing. It begins with a brave and endearing portrait of the old man, Leo Gursky, the writer who has lost his book. He spends his time working on being visible to the people around him, making sure that people will know he is walking the earth with them.

Leo wrote a book when he was still a young man in Poland, but he lost it when he had to hide from the Nazis. This novel is about that book, and the independent life it leads. It is published under a different name; it travels and is translated; it brings lovers together; it gives a young girl her name. This novel is also the story of that young girl and her brother. They themselves seem like refugees in this world, looking for show more their places.

All the characters in this book, including the book, struggle with the question of identity. All of them feel blessedly special and yet unutterably lonely and apart.

At times, the writing is crystalline and perfect, and at other times, it is a little jerky, like the labored breathing of a runner. It switches voices frequently, and not always smoothly, but generally the slightly off-key structure works well. It reminds us that writing doesn’t have to fit any particular structure; it just has to be honest. show less

Intricately crafted story with multiple points of view, centered around a book within the book. Leo Gursky wrote The History of Love about Alma, his childhood sweetheart. Leo tells his story in first person. It is year 2000 and he is eighty years old. He reflects back on life, love, loss, and loneliness. The second point of view is that of fifteen-year-old Alma Singer (named after the Alma of Leo’s book). The third is that of her brother, Bird, who believes he is a messenger of the Almighty.

The plot is compelled by a mystery, and young Alma is following clues to gain insight into her father’s life. She is trying to relieve her mother’s pain after the death of her father. Leo is still obsessed with his first love. He has endured show more many hardships during WWII in Poland, though the details of his experiences are mostly in the background. The book is beautifully written. I particularly enjoyed Leo’s story. It is a bittersweet tale, told with both humor and sadness. As is typical with Krauss’s books, there are a number of themes pertaining to Jewish history. show less

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”

Alma Singer is almost 15 years old and was named after every girl in a little known book called 'The History of Love' supposedly written by Polish emigrant Zvi Litvinoff which her widowed mother has been asked to translate. Alma sets out to find the real Alma from the book and the man who commissioned her mother to translate it.

Alma doesn't know that Leo Gursky, the real author of 'The History of Love', now lives in New York, or that he's never stopped loving Alma Mereminski, the girl whom he wrote about 60 years before and who escaped Poland carrying his child just before the arrival of the Nazis in the show more country. Leo Gursky is a survivor - he survived the Holocaust, Alma leaving for America and finding out that the woman he loves has married another man. What Leo doesn't know is that 'The History of Love' has also survived the trip across the Atlantic without him, was translated from Yiddish into Spanish and published, and although few people have ever read it, it had a special place in Alma Singer's parents' marriage.

'The History of Love' is a book of parallels. Leo's adoration for Alma Mereminsky parallels Alma Singer's parents' love. Leo and Alma's separation, parallels the death of Alma Singer's father. The manuscript Gursky wrote, and how it came to be published and translated without his knowledge, parallels Gursky's own life of invisibility. And Alma's experiences as she looks for the book's Alma, take place in parallel to Gursky's present life as an old man in New York.

This book is about love and loneliness in all their forms but is also about searching. Alma Singer is searching for the real Alma Mereminski. Alma's mother is searching for the right words to translate a beloved book into English, Alma's brother is searching for a meaning to his life despite only being 12. And Leo is searching his memories and fantasies. This book is also about history :the history of the manuscript, the history of Leo's friend Zvi Litvinoff, who published Leo's book, the history of Alma Singer as well as the history of Leo's life.

Krauss uses first person to tell her story meaning that the reader can get and personal with each character. Since Alma is only 14, her immature wanderings of a young girl's mind mix with her determination for her quest. Leo is an old man, his voice has the wisdom of age, mixed with a longing for the past and a need to be noticed. Alma's younger brother's voice as he struggles to find his destiny adds yet another dimension. Krauss succeeds to balance these various voices in a narrative that has an elegance as well as a certain humanity that I found both moving and heart-warming.

Overall I found this a fascinating and well written book that get me intrigued but was let down a little by a rather rushed ending. A bit of a shame. show less

“He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.”

The Simplest Questions Are the Hardest to Answer

1. What is love?
2. Who am I?
3. Is there a word for everything?
4. What sort of book is this?
5. What is a palaeontologist?

5. What is a Palaeontologist?

“If he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a palaeontologist.”

This beautiful book is a show more similar cornucopia of fragments. The narratives have different textures, colours, size, shape, weight, mood, and style. They connect in often unexpected ways: pieces may split, run parallel, then diverge, or be reunited. And yet. The result is wondrous, strange, and deceptively simple.

4. What Sort of Book is This?

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

It is ostensibly about love, but is at least as much about surviving loss and postponing death. It’s also about identity. And yet. The book itself has no single identity: love stories, investigative journal, self-help book, memoir, philosophical musings, historical fiction, bildungsroman, quest, survival manual, teenage diary, spiritual metaphor...

It is like Newton's Third Law interpreted as poetic allegory. Every force is counterbalanced by an equal and opposite force: writing and reading, truth and lies, taking and giving, youth and age, future and past, hope and despair, hiding and being seen, and ultimately, life and death.

3. Is There a Word for Everything?

“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?” a reader says to a writer. Long ago, “sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned.” Trying to describe the emotion of being moved “must have been like trying to catch something invisible”. Years later, the writer calls a book “Words for Everything”.

Many characters read, and all the main characters write, whether for publication or not, one “because an undescribed world was too lonely”. And yet. The bigger issue is the things that cannot be said, are not said, or are lost in transit or translation (whether by accident or design). Silence. Gaps. Absence. Loss.

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.”

There are three main narrators, but secondary sources (paratexts?), often with unknown or misattributed authorship, are key to the plot: letters, photos, obituaries, drawings, and books that may be “not unlike the truth”. Things are further muddied by mentions of real-life people (JL Borges, for instance), people who are real in Krauss’ book and are central to works of fiction within it, and a couple of characters who may not be real, even in that fictional realm. Where is truth?

2. Who Am I?

I thought I knew who I was. I don’t need to investigate or assert the truth of my identity in any legalistic sense, but like Alma S, I’m named after someone. Unlike her, I chose to claim my name for myself, rather than learn more about the one whose name I bear.

And yet. Of all the labels I can ascribe myself, many are in relation to others: mother, daughter, wife, friend, even English, British, European. I am not myself alone - even when it might feel like it. I can claim membership of numerous collective identities. Even as a reader, I am connected to other readers, as well as authors and their creations.

Silence. Gaps. Absence. Loss

“I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes… I lost the only woman I wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way… I didn’t also lose my mind?”

The characters on these pages have variously lost lovers, a parent, a child, their homeland, their health, their mission, and acknowledgement of their authorship, and some are concerned with extinctions at a species-wide level. And yet. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, they continue "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".

Survival may happen by accident, but it usually continues by will. While some focus on practical skills, most concentrate on ways to enhance and prolong life, and thus delay death - whether their own or someone else’s.

And yet. Krauss offers no easy answers, or even any definite ones. Just as there are many permutations to define who we are, so there are many, sometimes contradictory, ways to endure loss:
Notice and be noticed - or hide to survive?
Keep things the same - or change everything?
Acknowledge and remember - or forget in order to live?
Tell people you love them - or ask them to “Love me less”?
Look forward - or look back?
Develop rituals and superstitions - or apply cold logic?
“Sacrifice the world” to “to hold on to a certain feeling”
Fill the gaps with facts or fiction - or…

Learn to appreciate the beauty found in absence: the silence between notes of music, the pauses of punctuation:
"Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of the common sparrow."

Image of leaf/bird by Ukranian architect Oleg Shuplyak.

This isn’t a trite message about seeing the silver lining, but about finding a different way to see, to experience, to live, while acknowledging and appreciating who or what is missing.
“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.”

1. What is Love?

I am fortunate that the tragedies in my life have been minor compared with those experienced by the characters here. The cultural context and the smattering of Yiddish words are largely unfamiliar to me, too. And yet. Krauss spoke to me from these pages: to me, of me, and of others.

“I tried to make sense of things. It could be my epitaph.”
Sometimes, even if I've really enjoyed a book, I find myself thinking "And yet."
Not with this. Not even a little bit.
I guess that means it's perfect - even if I can’t adequately explain why, nor answer this final question.
I am a reader. Krauss is a writer. I am in awe.

Quotes

• “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.”
• “The boy became a man who became invisible. In this way he escaped death.”
• “At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same.”
• “The truth is a thing I invented so I could live.”
• “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.”
• “The words of our childhood [Yiddish]... became strangers to us… Life demanded a new language.”
• “The traffic lights bled into the puddles.”
• “Life is a beauty… and a joy forever.” Later, “Life is beautiful… and a joke forever.”
• “In the most important moment of his life he had chosen the wrong sentence.”
• “What is not known about Zvi Litvitoff is endless... These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.”
• “Holding hands… is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.”
• “Some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were sent to the paper compactor, where they were shredded to a pulp along with other unread or unwanted book, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine’s spinning blades.”
• A writer imagines books “As a flock of… 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 barely reading a page, how many never opened at all.”
• “Only now my son was gone did I realise how much I’d been living for him.”
• “I’ve always arrived too late for my life.”
• “I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I’d gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago.”
• “The door between the lives we could have led and the lives we had led had shut.”
• “The grammar of my life:... wherever there appears a plural, correct for the singular.”
• Not everyone stays in love:
JM married young “before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.”
Another says, “It’s hard to imagine any kind of anything - happiness or otherwise - without her. I’ve lived with Frances so long.”
• “She seemed to pull light and gravity to the place where she stood.”
• “Perhaps this is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.”
• “At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions… Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
• “To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape.”
• “After my Uncle Julian left, my mother became more withdrawn, or maybe a better word would be obscure, as in faint, unclear, distant.”
• “In another room, my mother slept curled next to the warmth of a pile of books.”
• “FOR MY GRANDPARENTS who taught me the opposite of disappearing and FOR JONATHAN, my life.“
• “Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

Further Notes

I have jotted down lists about the story, characters, and themes, showing the many and complex connections, HERE, but it is not a review (this one is), and it’s full of spoilers.

Reread

Read in January 2016 and again in July 2016. This review was updated slightly, and my further notes/appendix one significantly.

The reread was a bit like watching The Sixth Sense for the second or subsequent time: at least as good, but utterly different. The multi-threaded plot is so cleverly woven, and once you know the pattern, you spot all the little threads early on. In particular, on first reading, I didn't pay much attention to the irritating and self-important little brother, so his actual importance came as something of a shock. Knowing the outcome meant I was more interested in and sympathetic to him, and even more appreciative of the book as a whole.

Image sources
A heart, like the one used to represent Leo Gursky:
https://openclipart.org/image/2400px/svg_to_png/181644/anatomical-heart.png
Leaf/bird:
http://amazingdata.com/amazing-pictures-weird-fun-cool-images/Opticalillusionpai.... show less

Krauss had created a labyrinth of loneliness in the leaves of this lovely litany. The protagonist, Leo Gursky has survived Nazi infested Poland and so has the manuscript that he wrote , "The History of Love." Alma, the main character in Leo's manuscript and also a real woman whom he loves, fled their small village before the occupation. She made it to American and married another man.
Then we find another Alma, a teenager who has not only lost her father but who is actively trying to find a way to save both her mother, who is lost in loneliness after the death of her husband, and her younger brother Bird, who believes he may be a "lamed vovnik" one of only thirty-six holy men in the world.
It is the type of novel that deserves a second show more read, scattered throughout we find small gems, "And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you." We also find humor and compassion sprinkled throughout the many twists and turns of the this narrative. A great read!

Mary Jones show less