Win The History Of Love Produced By Nicole Krauss File Ebook

you ever felt so moved that it's as if you're possessed Reading The History of Love was like having my chest cracked open, the words flooding into me.


Some passages I loved:

The floorboards creaked under my weight, There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ashtray from the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, an empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder, wax melted down the neck.
I touched this thing and that, At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions, Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away, Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.


And this: Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant, Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs, But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I've pushed down for years springs out like a jackinthebox.


One more line, one that caused the words to swim on the page for me: "The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
"

The novel unfolds through several character viewpoints, through different narrative forms first person accounts, journal entries, excerpts from a novel within the novel itself called The History of Love, even poetry.
There is a literary mystery, at the heart of which is a love story that inspires other love stories, so that the novel itself is a history of love.
"If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love"

What a reading experience! I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about its premise.
All I knew was that it is highly regarded by many of my Goodreads friends, What you should know is that right after I finished reading it, I spent the rest of the day rereading and underlining passages and clues I might have overlooked.
Did you find yourself doing the same thing after watching The Sixth Sense for the first time Don't lie!

This book is a compelling, heartwarming study of loneliness, loss and adolescence.
At least ten to fifteen characters are inadvertently drawn together by a book published soon after World War II called The History of Love.
The mystery behind its author and publication, and the different lives it touches up to present day unfold in a series of personal journal entries, Central to the novel are a group of teenagers who each survive and/or escape the Nazi occupation of Poland only to find the overwhelming loneliness and grief that awaits them when they attempt to "start over.
"

I guess it depends on what you're going through at the moment, but this book just made my heart hurt so much, Not enough to cry, but enough to remind me that I am human, and that we all have personal circumstances that we're struggling to overcome, Sometimes one good day in a gloomy month is so precious that we dread the setting of the sun, The more I think about it, the more questions I have, Love is such a complex thing, whether it's fufilled, reciprocated, or never comes to fruition, . . it can be the thing that pushes us forward and makes us get out of bed every morning, That is pretty powerful, and Krauss did a magnificent job of relaying that message, One of the most beautiful and saddest “experimental” love stories Ive ever read,

Ive had this novel on my TBR since January, a very long time, The main reason it stayed there was the authors exhusband, Jonathan Safran Foer, I did not enjoy his book Everything is Illuminated and I wrongly presumed that I will not like History of Love either, A stupid idea, I know, but from the description it felt similar, Both are Jewish authors writing a book with multiple plot lines and the blurb also reminded me of Foers strangeness, Glad I finally got the courage to read this beauty,
I have no idea how to review this book, I also have no time at all to think so, again, it will be a short one,

There are a two main narrative voices and two episodic one, Leo Gurski, my favourite character is an old sad man of Polish origin living in NY, He once loved a woman named Alma and wrote a book about her which was lost in the war, Or was it Alma is a little girl who lost her father to a disease and her mother to grief still alive but barely, She is desperately trying to make her mother feel better, One day the mother receives a request to translate in English her favourite book which was a gift from her dead husband and which gave Alma her name.
As you might have already figured out, there is a connection between the two characters, namely the book called The History of Love,

I loved the structure of the novel, the multiple plot lines, the characters, the snippets from History of Love inserted in the novel, The characters live in the past, back when there was no loss, which makes them incapable to also live in the present, I think the name, History is well chosen, taking that in consideration, History of loss may be an even better title, as another reviewer wrote,

Thats all my sleep deprived brain can come up with, Read this novel, is beautiful,
I need to cut the crap with my preconceptions, Although I almost unfailingly launch into a new novel with great enthusiasm like a kid on Christmas morning, anxious to discover what hidden treasure awaits, for some reason I held out little hope for Mrs.
Foers book about a book about love, Maybe its because books about books about love arent usually my thing Maybe its because I read her husbands sitelinkbestseller last year and was less than impressed Maybe its because I had heard somewhere that they wrote their books together oh, how adorable!, bouncing ideas off one another and giving each other high fives, so naturally I assumed that if Mr.
Foers book was gimmicky which it is, then The History of Love would surely be a major eyeroller as well, right

Wrong.


Whatever the reason, I was clearly out of line, and for that I owe Nicole a huge apology, In this book she weaves three intersecting storylines all under a cloud of intriguing ambiguity, so even though it is understood that the stories are related, it isnt exactly clear how until about twothirds of the way through.
And as the stories of Leopold Gursky, Alma Singer, and Zvi Litvinoff are told to us, they leave an imprint on us even before we learn for sure who they are.


The History of Love is a gorgeous novel with gorgeous characters who do what characters do best: they love and they lose, they struggle and they fail, and if lucky they learn how to pick up the pieces and survive.
For them, survival is not a destination but a journey, Theres no magic cure and theres no endall, But taken one day at a time, it is possible to live a life worth living, Krauss reminds us that all we really want is to remain visibleto be known, to be loved, and to be remembered by those who knew and loved us.


I won a copy of this book through sitelinkWorld Book Night, a program begun in the UK last year to spread the love of reading.
That program has now arrived in the US, and even though I technically shouldnt have qualified for receiving a copy of thisWBN books are supposed to have been given only to “light” readers in the hopes that they become “moderate” readersI will make sure that it will have been worth their while by spreading my love for this book about a book about love.
One of the last books I read inwas Virginia Woolf's A Room of One Own, In this series of essays, Woolf maintains that if a woman has a room of her own in which to write, then she is more than capable of producing the same if not greater works than men.
While pondering myclassics bingo and what book to use as a free square, my thoughts turned to Nicole Krauss, I finally discovered Krauss last year, having read both Great House and Forest Dark, The prose in both novels was superb, leading literary critics to dub Krauss as one of the greatest Jewish writers since Kafka, Krauss has a desk of her own in which to write, discussing it at length in Great House, I decided it would be appropriate to use my bingo free square for her History of Love, another of her novels that weaves together multiple plot lines in Kafka like fashion.


Leopold Gursky is approaching the age of his death, As he nears his final hour, he can not help but reminisce about his childhood home in Slonim near Minsk and his boyhood friends Bruno Schulz real life author of Streets of Crocodiles and Zvi Litvinoff.
All three men decided upon careers in writing in their youth before the Nazis invaded Poland and shattered their dreams, Before Jewish life in Slonim ended, young Leopold Gursky fell in love with Alma Mereminski, With a name meaning soul and a body strikingly beautiful, Gursky decided at age ten that Mereminski would be the one true love of his life, even carving their initials into a special tree.
The young lovebirds knew that their love was something special however, the Nazis posed an even greater threat, and the Mereminski family fled to New York in, not before Alma became pregnant with Leo's child something neither was aware of.


Hiding in the forest for the duration of the war, Leo reached New York years later and learned about his son's existence, Named Isaac after a great Jewish Russian writer, the boy would go on to become a prolific writer in his own right yet pain Leo for the rest of his life.
Prior to going into hiding, Leo had written a manuscript that was close to his heart entitled The History of Love, He entrusted Zvi Litvinoff with this book for safekeeping, knowing that Litvinoff was fortunate enough to be leaving for the safety of Chile, Little did Gursky know that years later Litvinoff would change the language from Yiddish to Spanish and pass off this eloquent book as his own,

Years later, fourteen year old Alma Singer, named for the protagonist in History of Love, stumbles across a letter from one Jacob Marcus who is asking Alma's mother Charlotte to translate the book from Spanish to English.
The Singer family has been grieving over the death of their husband/father Daniel for the last seven years, and Alma believes that translating this book would make her mother happy again.
As she discovers discarded translations in the trash, Alma undergoes a personal quest to discover who her namesake was and why this protagonist named Alma profoundly moved her father to gift his copy of The History of Love to her mother.
In this process of self discovery, Alma unearths many answers as well as questions about both her father, her namesake, and their past,

In true Krauss fashion, she weaves together these three plot lines without either protagonist knowing of each other's existence, Gursky lives inside his memories hoping for one chance meeting with his son, who has know idea who his real father is, Alma is also searching for Alma Mereminski or someone who can provide clues as to who she was, Encouraged by her uncle to stop constantly grieving for her father, she is urged to step outside of her comfort zone of writing and books, As she matures, Alma learns clues about the History of Love, her father, and herself, Meanwhile, Krauss intersperses the sections about Gursky and Singer with the story of Litvinoff's life in Chile and how History of Love came to be, All three stories are moving and eventually come to a nexus toward the novel's denouement,

As with Nicole Krauss' two other novels that I have read, in History of Love I experienced mature literary fiction which had a profound impact on me.
I think I was moved the most by this novel because I have a daughter named Alma and I was touched by the protagonist Alma's capacity to love amidst her grieving.
This added personal twist seems to be a page out of Krauss' mature style of writing that I have come to love and look forward to.
She has certainly done well given a room of her own in which to write, and has become a leading contemporary literary fiction author, Having caught up with her novels, I happily anticipate the day she publishes

her next novel, whenever that may be,

stars.