The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. 1. I like reading but have never managed
to read more than a few pages of Proust. I know the Homerian stories but have ...
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
I like reading but have never managed to read more than a few pages of Proust. I know the Homerian stories but have never tried to read them in original form. Call me a Philistine, or perhaps a Spartan, but I don’t think I am unique there. Similarly, I admire the stories of Shakespeare but find the telling of them to be difficult at times, particularly when I was trying to assist my children with them during their high school years. My favourite novelist, Jane Austen, showed me 18th Century English life, while I have come to know the Louisiana bayous, the streets of Washington DC, and the old and new towns of Edinburgh from the truly literary crime fiction of James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, and Ian Rankin. The best novel I have ever read is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment runs a close second. I think the finest novel ever written in English was Moby Dick by Herman Melville and the best written in England was Middlemarch by George Eliot. My favourite novel of the early 20th Century was Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. My pick for the best novel published after World War II was Catch-22. I think the best living novelist is Philip Roth. But the most memorable and satisfying novel I have read in the last 10 years is The History Of Love (2005) by Nicole Krauss. Multiple apparently disparate narratives come together beautifully. A Polish Holocaust survivor, Leo Gursky, writes ‘The History of Love’ for his sweetheart, Alma. Given away during the Nazi invasion, the book somehow reappears in South America where a man internalises it in his own tragic experience of love as he translates it from Yiddish into Spanish. A Jewish traveler then discovers it in Chile and seeks an English translation from a woman in New York whose daughter, also called Alma, tries to matchmake him with his widowed mother. Of course, the elderly Gursky lives in New York too, along with a number of other quirky characters. The book is witty and sometimes sadly funny, but never maudlin. Somehow Krauss pulls it all together in a stunning coup. 1
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Her husband, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the same time as The History of Love. The similar style and themes cause those who read both to nod with recognition, but Krauss’s book is better. Rating 5/5
Robert Hitchins 7 December 2011
2
