The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The History of Love
8.9/10 dropps

ISBN: 9780393328622

It sounds terrible, but for what seems like forever, I had a difficult time finding contemporary female fiction authors whose work I truly loved. On a whim, I had picked up a copy of Brooklyn, New York author Nicole Krauss’s second novel The History of Love – and allowed it to collect dust and pencil shavings in the bottom of my backpack for weeks. As someone who’s always been more tomboy than princess, past attempts to break into woman-penned tomes left me feeling too much like “femaleissues” – rather than keen, adept character development – were the point.

And so, after exhausting every excuse in the book (my homework through next month was in check, there was nothing left to dust in the living room), I opened to chapter one… and couldn’t put the thing down. Krauss has a gift for emotive depth and storytelling that parallels none other that I’ve encountered in recent years. Though her parallel plot lines are reminiscent of her husband Jonathan Safran Foer’s fiction work (check out Nicole Maria Rea’s review of his recent nonfiction volume Eating Animals in Book Dropps), her elegant, true style and heart-wrenching abilities are completely unique.

The trials and tribulations of main character Leo Gursky are unraveled and re-woven throughout The History of Love. After losing his family to fascist German troops as a teenager and narrowly escaping Poland himself, Gursky attempts to rebuild with a life in America. The vast reasons for his sadness and longing are revealed through tangential scenes, flashbacks, and the discoveries of other grippingly wonderful protagonists like fifteen-year-old Alma Singer, a girl whose mother (yet another character whose heart is mired in the difficult end that love inevitably meets) is charged with translating a copy of a novel that Gursky had written long ago, inspired by the love of his life (another Alma. The Alma. Everyman’s long-lost).

Not since, well, ever has a work of fiction struck within me such an artful chord of life and belief in others. I was on the verge of tears more than once as I raced through the pages and chapters and decades of Leo and Alma’s story. Krauss’s chronicle of the characters’ lives itself is brutally true – I’ll make it clear that there is no sort of formulaic happily-ever-after Nicholas Sparks-esque nonsense going on here whatsoever. Instead, The History of Love is a fantastically-crafted exercise in real life: it bares the raw truth of things long gone and the burden of remembrance, while keeping in mind the resilience with which even the most emotionally-lost person may, in good time, begin to repair.

The History of Love is a book that I will treasure and recommend to many different types of readers for years to come. In addition to The History of Love, Nicole Krauss has also written Man Walks into a Room, and Great House, which made its debut in bookstores in October.

-Emily Simpson