The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

                            The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005) is one of those memorable reading experiences that is so satisfying and engaging that I was drawn immediately into a re-read of the book.  Set in contemporary New York City, this novel includes two protagonists,  both struggling with their love for an inaccessible object, both seeking to establish their voices in the world.  Old Leopold Gursky had fallen in love from childhood with Alma Mereminski in Poland in the 1920’s and ‘30’s.  But then she leaves for America and he barely survives the Holocaust, eventually making his way to New York City and Alma’s door, where he is turned away.  Leo’s narrative includes his struggle to experience and reveal the love for life and for others that fills him.  He writes, and then he loses the books, even as the books find their way into the world without his awareness of their publication.  Similarly, he has a son with whom he has no relationship, though he longs for some contact.  His son grows up to be a renowned writer, but Leo can never connect personally with him.  Instead, he spends his whole life honoring a relationship that had come to define love for him, even though it means that he denies himself a life in the present moment.

            Teen-aged Alma Singer is the parallel protagonist of the book.  Her conflicts include life without her father David, who died when Alma was seven and her brother, Bird, was still a toddler.  Alma’s mother never recovers from the loss of her husband, and, like Leo, is animated primarily by a love which exists only in memory.  Alma begins a journal called How to Survive in the Wild, ostensibly as a record of her studies of wilderness survival in imitation of her father.  As it turns out, survival in her family with a dead father, absent mother, and little brother who thinks he is a promised one of Israel is the more treacherous wilderness.  Alma’s narrative voice is expressed through her journal, in which she records her attempts to find her mother a new husband as a solution to her mother’s disconnect from life.  As Alma goes on, she realizes she is searching for something for herself, and that her mother’s grip on the past cannot be the prison that keeps Alma from living in her own moment.

            The History of Love as a title comes from the book repeatedly referenced within the novel.  Alma’s father had given this book to her mother early in their relationship, a book in Spanish translated from the Yiddish, by a Polish immigrant to Chile of the same era as Leo.  The third strand of Krauss’ novel is a third-person narration of  how this book came to be written and published.  Therein lies the fulcrum for this novel, and as the reader wonders what these two narrators’ stories have to do with each other, Krauss is using this third strand as the solder that welds Alma's and Leo’s voices into a unified piece at the book’s end.   The plot structure and voices within the book are so complex that the first time I finished the book and absorbed the impact of some of the plot bombs at the end, I asked myself, “How did she do that?”  In order to answer my question, I was compelled to go back and re-read the whole book, this time voice by voice.  I read all of Leo’s chapters, then all of Alma’s chapters, then the History of Love history, and finally, the two sections leading to the climax where Bird emerges as the book’s hero.

            The author rotates among these narrative strands, interweaving memories from each narrator’s past with their current attempts to resolve their sense of loss and hopes for love’s fulfillment in some ideal form.  Each narrator has his or her supporting cast: Leo has his childhood friend and current upstairs neighbor named Bruno; Alma has her brother Bird and Russian-immigrant boyfriend, Misha.  Each character is uniquely developed with the foibles of real and exceptional individuals.  For example, lonely Leo worries that he will die on a day when nobody has noticed that he is alive, so he intentionally draws attention to himself when he goes out in public, spilling change while standing in line at the grocery store and making a production of laboriously collecting each coin.  Brother Bird has a lemonade-stand racket that allows him to collect hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket to Israel.  Grandmother Bubbe leaves a prayer at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, asking God to give her granddaughter “some nice breasts.”   Misha performs a Beatles medley on the accordian at his bar mitzvah party.  Alma’s mother, the literary translator, nominates authors for posthumous Nobel prizes when she has read a book she admires.  Alma attempts to remain close to her father by timing how fast she can set up his tent in the dark. 

The History of Love begins as a story of loss and grief, and ends as a story of hope and satisfaction.  Redemption comes from the unlikeliest of places, as redemption must.  Characters all end the story true to themselves, a great satisfaction for the reader, while also participating in the epiphanies they had longed for. Thereby, this book serves as an exemplar of fiction as the lie that is true.  Anyone who has loved or been loved can see the self in this book.  Each one of us in our lives is living our own history of love, and our history is true enough to serve as a bridge to all other histories.  Love is the most innate and beautiful of human qualities, and this book serves as a tribute to the essential beauty of every life.

Link to Nicole Krauss' website: http://nicolekrauss.com/