Most Helpful Customer Reviews
240 of 252 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Miraculous Journey of Love and Chance, September 24, 2005
Nicole Krauss's astonishing novel about a manuscript that survives the Holocaust, a flood, broken friendships, a plagiarist, misunderstanding, and obscurity has all the heart and intelligence of the best fiction being published today. Elderly Leo Gursky is afraid of dying unnoticed, and he plans his days so that people will see him and remember him. Among other schemes, he makes a scene in Starbucks and poses nude for a drawing class. Leo wasn't always this lonely. Decades before, in a small town that was then part of Poland, he fell in love with a girl named Alma. He wrote a book about her before the two fled at different times and circumstances to safety during World War II. Despite the disappointments in his life, Leo continues to write, convinced that he will die when this next book is finished. Meanwhile, a teenager also called Alma, named after a character in a book titled The History of Love by a Chilean named Litvinoff, finds herself in the heart of a mystery: her mother is hired by a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus to translate The History of Love from Spanish. Since Alma's father passed away years before, her mother has been overcome with sadness, and Alma sets out to find Jacob Marcus as a possible suitor. Oblivious to Alma's quest, her brother Bird has decided he is one of thirty-six holy men, a "lamed vovnik", and might even be the Messiah. And then there's Litvinoff himself, in the past, with his personal story and connection to the manuscript and to Alma and to his own beloved Rosa. The stunning coup of this novel is how Krauss brings these diverse elements into a single, concluding moment.
Krauss has complete command of a story that could get away from a lesser novelist. Witty, sometimes sadly funny, with unforgettable off-beat characters, the novel draws in the reader from the first page, although its true strength isn't evident until the last hundred pages. The comparison of The History of Love to Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is inevitable, since the two authors are married and both books were published in 2005. While the two works echo each other in parts, use similar postmodern techniques, and concern themselves with related themes, Krauss and Foer are too good to be lumped together. Still, these seem like companion books. The History of Love is every bit as inventive and as emotionally riveting as Foer's novel - and vice versa - but it (as does Foer's novel) seems to wink at readers who have read both. Readers familiar with Foer's book will smile as Leo reveals that he is a retired locksmith who can open any door he wants. And the set-up of a young person, missing his/her dead father and searching New York for clues to solve a mystery will seem familiar. Beyond that, however, these books stand alone as remarkable works about people, both immigrants and natives, who are adrift in contemporary America.
This exceptional novel deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
369 of 398 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant but flawed, April 27, 2005
This book is very similar in both content and tone to Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's interesting to note that Foer and Krauss are husband and wife.
Summary, no spoilers:
This novel is told from the point of view of several narrators.
The first, and best narrator, (the parts that feature him are brilliant), is Leo Gursky. Leo lives by himself in New York. He was born in Poland, and fell in love with a girl named Alma. They vowed to spend their lives together.
Due to the war, Leo and Alma were separated, and Leo has spent his life alone, pining for Alma.
The other main narrator is a young girl also named Alma, who has lost her father to pancreatic cancer and lives with her young brother and mother. All have been terribly damaged by his death.
Although we occasionally get other narrators, the story is essentially told by these two wounded individuals. Alma tries to find the woman for whom she was named, and Leo tries to become a part of the living world, and become a part of his son Isaac's life. And all of this centers around a mysterious book entitled The History of Love.
This is a gorgeous book. Like Foer's novel, this book is funny, sad, and quirky. At times a bit too quirky.
I thought the chapters involving Leo were terrific. The book starts out with Leo's narration, and hence the book starts out on a powerful note.
Although I enjoyed the character of young Alma, the chapters involving her were often odd, and sometimes slowed the pace of the story.
Still, this book is worthy of 5 stars, and it would make a wonderful book club choice...there is a lot to discuss.
So who has the better book, Foer or Krauss? My vote goes to Krauss, who wrote a page turner that has a better flow, and is more accessible than the Foer's work.
Recommended.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
62 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely faithful and incredibly pure, May 22, 2005
The History of Love is a great novel. Plotted with exquisite precision, propelled by deeply sympathetic characters, and crammed full of mysteries and solutions, this book lights up neural networks you never knew you had. Besides recounting the stories of a 15 year old girl and a Holocaust survivor, Krauss's novel is also the story of a book (The History of Love). What it says about books is just as important as what it says about love, even if it isn't going to make the end-of-paper movement at cartel Microsoft very happy.
Nicole Krauss understands books to be what no other medium is: self-contained, tough, mobile over continents and generations and languages, full of the future as inscribed by a piece of someone's soul. The History of Love (the novel within the novel) has a provenance that would make a Rembrandt painting blush: written in Poland, manuscript given away then stolen, conceived in Yiddish, translated to Spanish, published in Argentina, found by a Jewish traveler, given to his wife, secretly translated into English, discovered by a 15 year old girl in New York, AND MORE. In Krauss's telling, none of this is random, and even though characters act unaware of each other, the larger plan somehow manifests G*d in the lives of the Living. Why don't I just write it: according to Krauss, when the soul of the writer is pure, a book becomes an immanent sacred object. And in that way, books are a lot like love, only rectangular and full of numbered pages.
If we esteemed writers by what their novels hold faith with, Nicole Krauss would sweep this year's fiction awards. Besides her faith in the power of the written word, there's faith in the integrity and goodness of young outsiders, in the quest to redeem history in old age, in the ability of human beings to shape their own destiny no matter how complicated and compromised, and in the presence of love as an active agent for good in the universe. Last, but not least, Krauss has faith that writers can change the world through writing. If they can, and she has, then we're just a little better off today than we were before The History of Love came into the world of readers.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
