As Leo Gursky nears the end of his life, he is haunted by loneliness. A Polish Jew displaced by World War II, Leo survived the war and followed the love of his life to New York, only to find that she had married another man and started a new life without him. Now an old man, Leo spends his days remembering the woman he loved and lost and thinking about the son whom he never knew. And every day, to stave off his feelings of invisibility, Leo tries to accomplish the “opposite of disappearing” by making a public spectacle to gain attention: “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.”
Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer, too, is acquainted with loss. After her father died of cancer, Alma and her family have lived in quiet dysfunction, each seeking solace in eccentric pursuits. Alma, for instance, cultivates an interest in wilderness survival tactics and is a compulsive list-maker; her mother, who has never recovered after her husband’s death, occasionally works as a translator to pay the bills; and Alma’s brother Bird thinks he might be the Messiah.
In Nicole Krauss’s poignant tale, the lives of these two characters are connected by a little-known book called The History of Love that Leo wrote long ago in Poland, and which Alma’s mother is currently translating. Through a multilayered narrative, Krauss slowly unfolds the story of how this book improbably survived, spanning time, distance, and language in order to change the lives of those who read it.
The text shifts between several time periods and points of view in a chronology that remains somewhat elusive until the conclusion of the book, though the story is not confusing or hard to follow. Each character is portrayed with a unique and convincing voice, and their experiences and characteristics are outlined in lifelike detail—for instance, Alma has a NASA pen that works without gravity, and Leo frequently takes passport photos of himself. Leo is perhaps the most engaging character because his history, memories, and thoughts are the most fully fleshed out, but the precocious Alma is also handled well.
Krauss intersperses the narrative with chapters from The History of Love, each covering a different “Age” in the history of human interaction. These humorous, moving, and sometimes fanciful excerpts are just as pleasurable to read as the main narrative. The chapter “The Age of Silence,” for instance, explains that “Holding hands [. . .] is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each others bodies to make ourselves understood.”
This beautifully written book can be enjoyed by anybody seeking a meaningful story populated by quirky and vividly depicted characters. But avid readers will particularly appreciate Krauss’s stunning affirmation of the power of literature to convey the full range of human history and emotion, and to change lives.