The History of Love, a Novel by Nicole Krauss

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, is a post modern reflection on the end of one life lived quietly, in the absence of love, and the beginning of a young girls journey into adolescence that could be a life of love or a life without.  The novel is told in interchanging first person narratives that reflect, examine, and define moments the "now" moments in each of their lives by colliding with events of life that have put them where they are.

Leo Gursky is an aging writer/locksmith who lost the only woman he would ever love when she was enabled to flee their small Jewish village in Poland on the eve of the Nazi invasion.  Leo's part in the story is that of an author whose great work went lost and unfinished, whose son (he does not know) grows into the writer Leo hoped to be, whose only friend is a school friend who is as much a ghost of the past as a catalyst for the present.

Alma Singer is a precocious Jewish girl growing up in the shadow of her father, lost to cancer, and watching her mother exist in a haze of loneliness and work and isolation and Alma wants to know what it is to know love and happiness for her mother, for her self, for her brother who believes he is a chosen Jew whose life will alter the course of history and bring blessings on those who he knows.

I am typically reticent about young, modern, American authors with sweeping titles on their sophomore novels like The History of Love but I was surprised and moved by the authentic voice Krauss lends to the Alma and Gursky and Bird (Alma's brother) as they search for the thing it is they are missing:  a history of love.

"The Long Goodbye", by Raymond Chandler

Books are the way I make small escapes out of the dreary monotony of the daily grind.  At coffee breaks and lunch I typically have a book on hand, the fifteen odd minutes it takes to slurp down scalding coffee at 10 and three and the half hour I have at lunch are filled to capacity with reading.  I read from most every genre but have found a collection of authors that suit my scattershot reading schedule to a tea.  Authors like Ivan Doig and David Mitchell and Sebastian Faulks and Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy write engaging, occasionally powerful, stories that can be taken in small doses.  But occasionally I need a bit of pulp.  Not trash, smut, or hollow baseless filth.  But gritty, abrasive life.  Recently I've gotten my fill of pulp from Raymond Chandler.

Chandlers books center on a blue collar private eye, Phillip Marlowe, who works out problems for a white collar crowd.  He drinks, smokes, carries a gun and generally associates with loose women and tough thugs.  But there is something redemptive about Chandlers work and as he fleshes out Marlowe there is a bit of human decency that filters through the cracks and no amount of papering can cover it completely.

The latest of his books I have read is "The Long Goodbye".  Typically he starts off writing about one mystery, diverts to another, and brings them together in the end.  In "The Long Goodbye" Marlowe befriends a British war hero cum alcoholic and "lap dog" for a spoiled, rich, wife:  Terry Lennox.  As the novels unfolds Lennox's wife is found dead, Lennox flees the country, and the case is closed by the influence of the dead wife's father.  Marlowe goes about his business of taking on clients, pestering the police, and generally not minding his own business.

I will confess that the stories, while not exactly predictable, follow a fairly obvious pattern and Marlowe, for his gruff, gritty lifestyle, is a little too tidy as a character.  But Chandler is perfectly candid and authentic as an author bringing out the street language of L.A., a call it how i see it portrait of racial and gender roles of the time, vivid sociall paradox, and the rugged, enduring condition of the human spirit to survive.

A person could do much, much worse than taking a gamble on Raymond Chandler for a bit of escapist reading.

Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell

Typically David Mitchell's novels tend to be post mordern epics spaning generations and continents, laced with relational themes and threads of interconected characters and experience.  These novels, like Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten and surreal and captivating stories that read like a car wreck where everthing is twisted metal and burning cloth and the smell of gasoline promises an explosion.  But some of his work follows more traditional boundaries and tells a lineal story in a masterful and authentic voice.  But all of his work brings it main theme to bear on human fraility and flaw and how individuals rise to overcome insecurites and fear.

Black Swan Green is almost a collection of short stories that span a year in the lif of Jason Taylor, a 13 year old boy in a small village in Worchester, England.  Jason has a stutter, an older sister, and parents struggling through a rocky marriage.  From January to January Jason has to overcome insecurities surrounding his stutter, stand up to bullies at school, and deal with hard life experiences -- war, death, disability, bigotry, drunk and sometimes abusive fathers, first kiss, divorce, moving. 

But the story is, ultimatly, about Jason growing up and entering adolesence.  At the begining of the novel he is hindered by a mythology that explains the world around him and gives reasons for the way people are what/who they are.  But slowly his mythology is altered and dropped as layers of the people in the small farming village are stripped away and he has opporitunities to see beneath the surface and recognize that people act tough for a reason, act stupid for a reason, hide behind feined ignorance for a reason.

I think that Black Swan Green illustrates that life is not surface deep, people struggle for breath behind closed doors and often just keeping thier mouths above to the surface of the water is all they can do.  Mitchell's novel is rich, colorful, and deep and told with the complex voice of an honest boy in a crazy world.  It is well worth your time.