'History of Love' by Nicole Krau

Posted by Kerry Kubilius May 24, 2007

So I was doubtful when I picked up The History of Love from the bookshelf at my local bookstore. So grandiose seemed its title, so suspicious was its praise-ridden cover. I've been burned by the New York Times Bestseller list before. And I have a hard time believing that any book written today and sitting on a bookshelf in a bookstore that caters to mass-market paperback sales could be "astonishing" (as the Washington Post said breathily, accompanied by other publications' admissions of "marvelous" and "ingenious" ). Give me a break. Right? Wrong.

Nicole Krauss had me from page one. A difficult thing to do if you aren't Nabokov. The crotchety old Polish man, Leon Gursky, was such an unexpected protagonist and so alive in his waiting to die, that I had to read more. And there was more. There was Leon's son, an author. There was Alma Singer, whose story was all her own, so it seemed. There was the enigmatic Zvi Litvinoff, who claimed the History of Love as his only work, and whose focal point was a woman with a name shared by Alma Singer.

The History of Love is not a history book. It does not detail historical events or feature real characters. The book is full of journeys - immigration, life and death, the search for identity, the search for memory, the effort to be remembered.These journeys mimic and magnify immigration experience from a Polish perspective, and from a Jewish perspective, but more importantly, from a human perspective. There is not a drop of "We are Jews, and we have suffered - you wouldn't understand" - which is something I have enountered, sometimes only by implication, in other books about similar journeys (Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran-Foer is one that immediately comes to mind). The History of Love takes readers through the same twists and turns Eastern European immigrants - Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or of other religious background - might have experienced. This makes the book of broad interest that speaks of the immigration experience in a way that anyone can understand and sympathize with.

Identities are lost, family members and friends are written off or resurrected, connections are made from pieces that seem unrelated, new names are taken, histories are written and forgotten, everything seems meaningless and at the same time of utmost imortance. The History of Love is surprising at every turn of the page and touching without being sappy. The various voices used in the book are distinctive from one another and clear and keep the changes in narration engaging.

Is this book really "astonishing," "marvelous," and "ingenious"? These seem paltry choices for descriptors. This book is worth more than the time you'll spend reading it. You'll be thinking of the story and its characters long after you put it down - which most New York Times Bestsellers fail to do . . . even the "marvelous" ones.