Characters drawn with empathy and truth are the first thing a reader notices in “The History of Love.” It takes all of about half of the opening paragraph to want to know a whole lot more about the narrator.
But wonderful characters cannot, by themselves, carry the full weight of a novel, and Nicole Krauss does not ignore the needed story element. In this intricately and carefully constructed tale, Krauss writes of love and loss in youth and in age. In doing so, she reveals the characteristics of humanity that transcend time and the experience of living.
Leo Gursky survived persecution as a Polish Jew during World War II, but he’s not doing so well surviving as an 80-year-old in New York City. He has adopted a routine in which he does something to get himself noticed every day: buying juice and dropping his change on the floor, fumbling his popcorn in the lobby of a movie theater. It is perhaps an instinctive gesture, the antidote to an invisible life.
In another part of the city, at the other end of life, is 15-year-old Alma Singer. Her father died when she was 7, and her mother has never fully moved on from the loss. Alma is named for a character in her parents’ favorite novel, “The History of Love.”
Alma and her younger brother, Bird, each are looking to fill the hole left by their father’s death. Bird is obsessed with religion and believes he may be the Messiah. Alma is fixated on developing the skills needed to survive in the wilderness, and she is collecting her thoughts in notebooks she has titled “How to Survive in the Wild.”
Leo came to the United States after the war to join the young woman he had loved in Poland. He didn’t know that when she left their small town, fortunately before the war, she was pregnant with their child. She didn’t know that he had survived the war. By the time he found her, he was 25 and she was married and had a second child. Leo never knew his son, Isaac, watching instead from a distance as he grew and became a respected novelist. It was another facet to an invisible life, a man who first hid his presence from the Nazis and then hid is love for the woman and her child.
Alma’s mother, who makes her living as a translator of manuscripts, is provided a generou, private commission to translate “The History of Love” from the original Spanish. Little is known about its author, Zvi Litvinoff, except that he, like Leo, grew up a Polish Jew.
Krauss’ narrative is woven from three distinct threads. The first is Leo’s narrative, conventional in form and revealing a man whose life has been rich but not necessarily happy. Alma’s sections read more like journal entries, short pieces occasionally no more than a sentence long that feel like a product of a 15-year-old’s sensibility. Her choice of topics is wide-ranging – her family, her father’s death, trying to arrange dates for her mother and her own growing maturity and the questions that arise. The final thread is a third-person narrative that reveals the little that may be known about Litvinoff.
The action is propelled by Alma’s desire to know more about the enigmatic man who commissioned the translation of “The History of Love.” And the more she pursues the mystery, the more it becomes clear that there must be some connection between Leo and Alma.
Krauss’ novel is one fine work. The story is part comic and part sad, a bit of a mystery but certainly not a tragedy. As in the best novels, many questions are raised and no easy answers provided. The characters are compelling and true, and the reader will come through the book not just caring about but wanting to heal them.
Nicole Krauss will appear at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Cherry Creek, 2955 E. First Ave., at 7:30 p.m. June 6. She also will be at the Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St., at 7:30 p.m. June 7.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
W.W. Norton, 252 pages, $23.95
