Book Review: The History of Love Novel by Nicole Krauss

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Introduction:

Author: Nicole Krauss

Language: English

Genre: The novel, Romance novel, Postmodern literature, Psychological Fiction.

About the Author

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010), and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. 

Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008, and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. 

A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020. Krauss's second novel, The History of Love, was first published as an excerpt in The New Yorker in 2004, under the title The Last Words on Earth. 

The novel, published in 2005 in the United States by W. W. Norton weaves together the stories of Leo Gursky, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor from Slonim, the young Alma Singer who is coping with the death of her father, and the story of a lost manuscript also called The History of Love. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction.

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Review

In Poland, approximately 70 years before the present, the 10-year-old Polish-Jewish Leopold (Leo) Gursky falls in love with his neighbor Alma Mereminski. The two begin a relationship that develops over the course of 10 years. In this time, Leo writes three books that he gives to Alma since she is the only person he deeply cares about. Leo promises he will never love anyone but her.

Alma, now 20, is sent to the United States by her father, who feared the alarming news concerning Nazi Germany. Leo does not know that Alma is pregnant and dreams of going to America to meet her. A short time after, the Germans invaded Poland and Leo take cover in the woods, living on roots, small animals, bugs, and what he can steal from farmers' cellars. 

After three and a half years of hiding, he goes to America and finds Alma but is shocked to hear she thought he had died in the war and had married the son of the manager of the factory she works at. He is devastated when he finds she has had another child with her husband. 

He asks her to come with him, but she refuses. She tells him, however, about his son Isaac who is now five years old. Heartbroken, Leo leaves, and later becomes a locksmith under the guidance of his cousin. Leo regularly watches Isaac from a distance, wishing to be part of the boy's life but scared to come in contact with him.

In the present day, Leo is a lonely old man who waits for his death, along with his recently found childhood friend, Bruno, and Alma has been dead for five years. Leo still keeps track of his son, who has become a famous writer, much to Leo's enjoyment since he believes Isaac inherited the talent from his father. 

Leo's depression deepens when he reads in a newspaper that his son has died at the age of 60, and Leo develops an obsession with finding his place in his son's world, to the extent that he breaks into Isaac's house to see if he had read Words for Everything, a book about his life that he recently wrote and sent to Isaac.

One day, her mother receives a letter from a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus who requests that she translate The History of Love from Spanish to English for $100,000, to be paid in increments of $25,000 as the work progresses. Alma's mother finds the sum suspicious, but the stranger confesses that his mother used to read the book to him when he was a child, so it has a great sentimental value. 

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Alma sees this as an opportunity to help her mother recover from her depression and changes her mother's straightforward letters to Jacob Marcus into more romantic versions. When the letters stop before her mother completes the translation of the book, Alma decides to find the mysterious client.

She starts by noting down what she knows about Jacob Marcus in her diary and concludes that the Alma in the book was real and proceeds to find her. She struggles in her search for Alma Mereminski but succeeds when she realizes that Alma could have married and finds her under the name of Moritz. 

She is disappointed to hear that Alma has been dead for five years. However, she finds out that Isaac Moritz is the first of Alma's sons and a famous writer. When she starts reading his bestselling book, she finds that the main character's name is Jacob Marcus and realizes that Isaac Moritz had hired her mother to translate the book. 

Isaac is dead, however, which explains why his letters had stopped coming to their home. To be sure about her suspicions, Alma leaves a note on Isaac's door asking who the writer of the novel is.

In meanwhile, Bird finds Alma's diary and misinterprets the names, Alma Mereminski and Alma Moritz as being his sister's real names, and believes they had different fathers. Isaac's brother calls Alma, after reading the note and the original manuscript of the book, to tell her that Gursky is the real author, but Bird answers the telephone and it confuses him even further. 

He now suspects that Leopold Gursky is Alma's real father. To cleanse his sin of bragging and to regain the status as one of the chosen ones, he decides to set up a meeting with Alma and Gursky, thus doing a good deed without anybody knowing except God.

When the two receive the letter regarding their meeting, both are confused: Alma tries to discover which of the people she met during her searches could have sent her the note, while Leo comes to believe it was Alma who sent him the note, despite her being dead.

Leo settles himself on a park bench, waiting a long while for Alma to appear. He ponders his life, key moments from his past, the loss of his love, and what it means to be human. The last chapter is entitled "The Death of Leopold Gursky" and is identical with the last chapter of the book inside the book The History of Love, both being the self-written obituary of Leopold Gursky. 

By ending the novel this way, Krauss is richly alluding to earlier parts of the novel and to her theme of how words keep people alive for us, indeed, make people in danger of becoming invisible, visible. Zvi Litvinoff carried Leo's self-written obit in his pocket for years, as a talisman guarding against Leo's death. 

Litvinoff, when preparing History of Love for publication, insists that his editor include the Leo Gursky obit at the end, his way of ensuring that Leo will continue to "live" in the hearts of all readers of the book. And finally, Nicole Krauss includes the same obit at the end of her novel, as a way of urging all readers to keep this Leo, and all Leos, alive.

Why should you buy this novel?

"A the significant novel, genuinely one of the year's best. Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense." "Big, bold, twist-your-heart sad, kick-your-heels joyful―Nicole Krauss's brilliant novel is as deep and multifaceted as love itself."

Rating for this book:- 4.6/5

You can easily get a copy of this book from Amazon: The History of Love

Written By - Govinda Kumar

Edited By - Anamika Malik