18.Nov.2009 Witerary Wednesdays: History of Love

Nicole Krauss’s novel History of Love is an anatomy of loneliness, and a compendium of hope. Leo Gursky is an invisible man, elderly and despairing. His son, a famous writer, knows nothing of his existence, much to Gursky’s desolation. He has worked out a routine with his neighbour and friend whereby they check that the other is alive, lest they lie rotting in their apartments for weeks, such is his life of solitude. And he’s written a novel, that no-one has ever seen, until now.

Then we meet Alma, a fourteen-year-old with a simplistic view of her own complicated world. She makes it her mission to find love for her widowed mother. In these stories we discover, as the characters do, the power of words, their bewitching qualities. Krauss simultaneously creates and defies genres as she builds an edifice of our flawed identity and the power it uses to rule over us.

A comparison with Jonathan Safran Foer would be called for even if he wasn’t Krauss’s husband. The similarities between his two novels and this one are quickly apparent, making their presence known in structure: a story within a story within a story; enumerated mini-chapters, sometimes simply a paragraph long, with titles such as “The one thing I am never going to do when I grow up”. Then there is the Jewish-American identity of the characters and their history running through the book. These things are not, of course, flaws, unless you think them so in Safran Foer’s books also; they simply exist in common.

And, like Safran Foer, Krauss speaks of memories, and this is where the true magic of the book lies, in her resurrection of lives. Though, at times, all of this playing in the past made me impatient for more action in the present.

Leo Gursky is an unbearably awkward and yes, pathetic man, a life lived with an acute lack of meaning. He’s a true eccentric, which is a hard thing for a writer to bring to life in an accurate way, but Krauss succeeds admirably.

Krauss speaks in and of the absurd poetry of life, using words simple and profound. A conversation between two children speaks of the spectrum of human emotion: “Are you the happiest and saddest you’ve ever been?” “Of course I am.” “Why?” “Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.”

A moving novel: 8.5/10.