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A review by doctorwithoutboundaries
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
5.0
Update: Read for the second time and loved and appreciated its tenderness and artistry even more; I can’t say enough about this book, but I’ll try again, soon. Until then, my thoughts from five years ago:
A tale of love amidst loss and loneliness and longevity through literature and language, this is the cleverest and most emotionally resonant book that I’ve read this year. It’s imperfect; the personalities feel clichéd, and the conclusion feels contrived. “And yet.” These characters and the words that bind them refuse to leave my thoughts. A deeply affecting story that is not devoid of humour, zest, and intrigue, an intricate mystery solved with equal delicacy, Nicole Krauss’ novel accomplishes a great deal in fewer than three hundred pages. So I decided to applaud the book for all that it is, not chide it for what it never tried to be.
That Krauss can alternately inhabit the minds of an eighty year-old man and a fifteen year-old girl with such precision, without the slightest hint of difficulty, is enough to earn my admiration. But then she surpasses herself with a third person narration that’s as eloquent as the mythical quality she lends to the nested narrative. I’m not a reader who takes notes, but this is a book that needs to be read again and closely the next time, for it is a vessel of delightful literary devices, structural and stylistic variations, allusions, repetitions, and an unobtrusive symbolism—all of which are braided together with the utmost care.
The book is brimful of carefully planned details; even the dedication is in keeping with its theme. Its pages are littered with clues that readers must collect and investigate like Alma Singer does, reconstructing history as a palaeontologist would do, till, like Leopold Gursky, the stories that make up silence and the words that fall through gaps become visible at last. So, analysis will someday replace this effusive praise, I hope—when I’ve finally found the “Words for Everything”. Until then, I honour this book with its own passage: “I don’t know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me.”
A tale of love amidst loss and loneliness and longevity through literature and language, this is the cleverest and most emotionally resonant book that I’ve read this year. It’s imperfect; the personalities feel clichéd, and the conclusion feels contrived. “And yet.” These characters and the words that bind them refuse to leave my thoughts. A deeply affecting story that is not devoid of humour, zest, and intrigue, an intricate mystery solved with equal delicacy, Nicole Krauss’ novel accomplishes a great deal in fewer than three hundred pages. So I decided to applaud the book for all that it is, not chide it for what it never tried to be.
That Krauss can alternately inhabit the minds of an eighty year-old man and a fifteen year-old girl with such precision, without the slightest hint of difficulty, is enough to earn my admiration. But then she surpasses herself with a third person narration that’s as eloquent as the mythical quality she lends to the nested narrative. I’m not a reader who takes notes, but this is a book that needs to be read again and closely the next time, for it is a vessel of delightful literary devices, structural and stylistic variations, allusions, repetitions, and an unobtrusive symbolism—all of which are braided together with the utmost care.
The book is brimful of carefully planned details; even the dedication is in keeping with its theme. Its pages are littered with clues that readers must collect and investigate like Alma Singer does, reconstructing history as a palaeontologist would do, till, like Leopold Gursky, the stories that make up silence and the words that fall through gaps become visible at last. So, analysis will someday replace this effusive praise, I hope—when I’ve finally found the “Words for Everything”. Until then, I honour this book with its own passage: “I don’t know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me.”