Book Love

...and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. ~Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

There are certain books you read that steal your breath, in that heartbreaking, I-wish-I-had-the-skill-to-manipulate-the-English-language-like-that way. For me, that list includes Interpreter of Maladies, The Kite Runner, a few others, and now The History of Love. After Ari raved about it this summer, I checked it out at home (and then at Schlow when I didn't finish it at home...), and now that I have finished it, I just want to read it again and again.

The intricacies of each of the four main characters' stories were just incredible. The way they all tied together revealed much more thought on the part of Nicole Krauss than what actually made it into the book. (This reminds me of Taylor Mali's line, "I make them show all their work in math, and hide it on their final drafts in English.") Near the end, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering if Leo would get some sort of resolution. He was one of those characters that, from the very first page, takes you in and makes you care about him. In caring about him, it is like you are making up for not caring about all the lonely old men you have passed in New York. In caring about his book, The History of Love, which he doesn't even know has been published, it is like you are making up for not being able to read every lonely volume in a bookstore.

While the book is obviously about love - platonic, romantic, filial, lost - I think it is also about human resilience and survival. Leo faces more tragedy than anyone ever should: he loses the only woman he's ever loved; he loses his family; he escapes WWII-era Poland; he loses his manuscript; he has a heart attack; the list goes on. And yet. Maybe he's not what one would ever call "triumphant," but he survives.

Leo's Krauss's gift for language, particularly in the chapters about the Age of Glass and the Age of Silence, but evident throughout the entire work, is stunning. Maybe it's because I've been in a romance-y mood lately - I saw Away We Go with Yancy on Thursday and couldn't stop smiling afterward, while at the same time faux-lamenting the lack of a Burt Farlander in my life - but I absolutely loved lines like the one I quoted above and a thousand others, including: "Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together." Given our finite lexicon, you wonder how it's possible that no one before Krauss had strung the same simple words together to form these beautiful sentences. So good.