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  • Reading The History of Love

  • I wasn't completely sure how I would feel about Nicole Krauss's The History of Love at first. When we started with a chapter where an elderly man talks about his flatulence, I had concerns. However, there's a symmetry between Krauss's book and her husband Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and In ... Continue

    I wasn't completely sure how I would feel about Nicole Krauss's The History of Love at first. When we started with a chapter where an elderly man talks about his flatulence, I had concerns. However, there's a symmetry between Krauss's book and her husband Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I was similarly worried when the first page of that book featured speculation about a talking anus. The good news is that in both cases, that kind of metaphor and description goes away quickly and leads into something much more inspired.

    The History of Love swaps narratives between three (and then at the end, four) characters. We meet Leo Gursky, the elderly man who lives alone and has a penchant for writing and making people pay attention to him. Next, we are acquainted with teenager Alma, who is obsessed with learning more about a book her mother is translating - titled The History of Love. Finally, we see the actual evolution of the book itself as we learn about the author on the title page. In the end, all come together in a most rewarding way.

    This is a book about writing, to be sure. It's also a story about the endurance of love. By the time I got to the end, I was in love, too.

    

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• ― moogle said on Mar 27, 2007 | Add your feedback

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  • The. Greatest. Book. Ever.

    I wish I had words to describe how wonderful this book is and how happy I am that I own it. I'm ready to read it again and I just finished it!!

    

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• ― mndy said on Jun 27, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

• .

  • Very similar in style and in story to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    

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• ― polacek said on Jul 26, 2007 about the Paperback edition| 1 feedback| 1 feedback

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn't know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full—keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild—she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories.

This extraordinary book was inspired by the author's four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss—Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.

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