upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
”
I found this quote from a listicle please don't judge me! ofof the most beautiful sentences in literature, This one particular sentence left me with a heaping serving of "the feels" and so without a second thought, I chucked the book I was reading at that time and started reading "The History of Love.
"
A few chapters later, I realized that this was not the sappyromantic book I was hoping for! The story is more heartbreaking, in a way.
I'm quite happy to be proven wrong, though, Sad as it may be, the prose could take your breath away, I discovered another work of art, more beautiful than that one sentence that lead me to it,
"The History of Love" is not really much of a history at all, It's more like a meditation on love, or an exploration of love, It's the story of a bunch of people who are not only searching for love, but also searching for themselves, and trying to find their places in the world.
Once the characters' lives intertwine, the ending introduces questions of fate, destiny, and the things that connect us to each other and to the universe.
More than that, though, the ending reaffirms the power of love no, not the sappy's song!, It sustains through the years and unites people across decades, miles, and circumstances,
In the end, even though it isn't the romance I was hoping to read, I still came away feeling pretty darn good about love and love stories.
How is it that even the people who have suffered the most from having fallen in love still remember it as the most precious thing in the universe How do the folks who have not yet experienced it know it when they see it And what in the world would be in the pages of the actual history of love I don't think one volume would cut it! The book, unfortunately, doesn't give simple answersbut, of course, love is nothing if not complicated.
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,
Being Moved
If you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer, I mean no disparagement by saying that nobody does Holocaust survivortragedy better than she, The old man in the empty Manhattan apartment whose pregnant Polish sweetheart had left him years ago for America, and whose closest contact with his son is at the son's wake is tragedy with punch.
As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relationship with yet another survivorfigure who is obsessed with the work of an obscure South American poet he a betrayersurvivor.
Identities blur and flow into one another until the reveal becomes complete, The way human beings deal with chance, particularly the randomness of death, and the role of the longterm tragedy of chance itself become pitiable, With her remarkable skill, Krauss entraps I have no better word the reader into her emotional universe, Her oeuvre is emotion and as one of her characters says, "The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved but to describe it just to name it must have been like trying to catch something invisible.
" She does a good line in making much that is invisible if not entirely clear then at least something to be considered seriously, savoured like a good kosher meal.
"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, نمی دونم چرا اینقدر نوشتن راجع بهش سخته. نمی دونم بعضی جمله های این کتاب چطور منو به این اندازه داخل کتاب می کشید
از اسم کتاب توقع یک داستان عاشقانه رو دارید
این کتاب راجع به عشق نیست راجع به زندگیه که عشق هم جزیی از اونه
لئوپولد یک مرد یهودیه که با حمله نازی ها فرار می کنه و به سختی خودش رو به آمریکا می رسونه و در این فرار همه چیزش رو از دست میده, حتی عشق زندگیش رو. حالا لئوپولد یک پیرمرده که از مرگ در تنهایی می ترسه
آلما دختریساله ست که اسمش از روی شخصیت اصلی کتاب مورد علاقه پدر مادرش یعنی "تاریخ عشق" گذاشته شده. آلما در حال کنار اومدن با مرگ پدرشه و پیدا کردن راهی برای خوشحال کردن مادرش
این دو داستان در موازات هم حرکت می کنند. ولی کجا قراره به هم برسند حدس زدنش سخته چون داستان پیچیدست
داستان هایی که از چندین دید روایت می شن این ریسک رو دارند که با بعضی شخصیت ها ارتباط برقرار نشه. من عاشق لئوپولد بودم و منتظر تکه هایی که راوی می شد. عاشق دید عجیبش به دنیا غم عمیقش. ولی راجع به آلما اینطور نبود
فرهنگ یهودی در این کتاب موج می زنه و برای من جالب و خواندنی بود ولی تکه های کوچکی که در رابطه با اسرائیل بود و سختی هایی ! که برای ساکن شدن در اونجا کشیدند سخت بود که با علاقه بخونم
به خاطر جمله های فوق العاده ش می دونم که حداقل تکه اول این کتاب رو دوباره می خونم. به خاطر لئوپولد. به خاطر کتابی که در بین صفحات این کتاب مخفی شده و از تاریخ عشق می گه ولی نه اونطور که همه فکر می کنند. فقط باید این جمله هارو بخونید تا بفهمید چی می گم
.
حتی هنوز هم تمام احساسات ممکن وجود ندارند. هنوز حس هایی هستند که فراتر از ظرفیت و تخیل ما هستند. گاهی اوقات وقتی قطعه موسیقی ای که کس دیگری ننوشته یا نقاشی ای که کس دیگری نکشیده یا چیز دیگری که پیشبینی تصور و یا توضیح آن غیرممکن است ایجاد می شود حس جدیدی وارد دنیا می شود