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.
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