Aikigek 5775 5775 itibaren Malakpur, Uttar Pradesh 250611, India
Oh, I did love me some Lestat when I first read this book.
Original Comments (Pre-Review): I would like to review this novel more formally in the near future, but to do so I'll have to flick through it and refresh my memory. My reaction at the time was that it was one of the best novels I had ever read. Nicole Krauss understands people and love and feelings and she writes about them in a word perfect way. As a reader, I am prepared to go wherever she wants to take me. I will trust her judgement. I have recently watched a few of her videos and interviews on Youtube and she's also someone who I enjoy listening to when she speaks about her craft and her choice of subject matter. This probably sounds very gushy and naive, but I promise to write something more considered. Review (September 26, 2011): Warning about Spoilers I have tried to minimise and identify plot spoilers. However, this is an emotional response to the novel, and might reveal significance that you might want to enjoy by way of your own detection. I hope that my review doesn't spoil anything for you, or if it does, that you quickly forget it. Lives Lived and Measured by the Deli Counter Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love” is one of my favourite novels of all time. I read it once pre-Good Reads, and have just re-read it, so that I could review it. And I will read it again. Often. That doesn’t count the numerous times I have fingered through the book seeking out passages and expressions and meanings and significances that stimulated or appealed to me. It’s an exquisitely crafted tale of love, loss, longing, hope, defiance, resilience and, it has to be said, delusion. I love its Jewish wisdom and concern with the family, I love its Yiddish rhythms and expressions and humour and playfulness, I love the window it offers into the millennia of Jewish culture and enrichment of the world. When I open the pages of this book, I feel like I am walking into the best delicatessen or pastry shop in the world. Everything is there on display, everything is on offer (we can eat in or take away!). It’s all been made with consummate skill and affection, it’s designed to satiate our appetite, to enrich our lives. I look at it all, knowing it will feed us, it will sustain us, it will revive our energy. It’s food for thought, it’s food for life. I'm sure it will help us live our own lives and tell our own tales, it will equip each of us to tell our own History of Love. I am wearing my Second Avenue Deli t-shirt as I think and type this. Legend “The History of Love” is written from four different perspectives, each of which is represented by a different symbol at the beginning of the chapter: Leo Gursky = a heart Alma Singer = a compass Omniscient Narrator = an open book Bird (Alma’s brother) = an ark Once Upon a Time Once upon a time, there was a Polish boy named Leo Gursky who loved a girl across the field named Alma Mereminski. “Her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering”. He asked her to marry him when they were both still only ten. “He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. "What if I die? She asked. Even then, he said.” He carved “A+L” in the bark of a tree and had someone take a photo of the two of them in front of that tree. He writes three books for her, all in their native Yiddish, the last being “The History of Love”. Book 1: this one was about Slonim (Alma says, “she liked it better when I made things up”) Book 2: he made up everything for this one (Alma says, “maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything”) Book 3: “The History of Love” (Leo says,"I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only things I knew.”) In July, 1941, that boy, who was now a man of 21, avoided murder by the German Einsatzgruppen, because he was lying on his back in the woods thinking about the girl. “You could say it was his love for her that saved his life.” Alma’s father had already saved her by sending her to America. Unbeknown to either of them, Alma was pregnant with their son, Isaac, when she left. Oblivious to the birth of his son, Leo lives in hiding surrounded by Nazi atrocities. Letters back and forth fail to reach their destination. He even writes his own obituary, when he is in the depths of illness and despair. By the time Leo finally escapes to New York himself, five years later, he has become an invisible man in the face of death. He traces Alma, only to learn that she has had their child and that, believing he was dead, she has married another man. He is ecstatic that “our sum had come to equal a child” ("A+L=I"). He asks her once to “come with me”, she can’t and he does the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away. He has little involvement with Alma or Isaac after that, except as an occasional remote observer. And yet. He continues to love Alma, though he now has another quest: to determine whether Isaac, who becomes a famous writer in his own right, ever knew about his father and that he wrote “The History of Love”. Once Upon Another Timeline Once upon another time (it is the year 2000 when Leo is 80 and believes he is approaching death), a precocious 15 year old girl goes by the name Alma Singer. Her mother, Charlotte, a literary translator who specialises in Spanish literature, named her after every girl in a book Alma’s father David gave her mother called “The History of Love”. It is written in Spanish, and the "author" is Zvi Litvinoff, a friend of Leo’s who, after Leo left Poland, escaped to Chile, carrying with him the original Yiddish manuscript of “The History of Love” for safekeeping. Alma’s father died when she was seven. Like Leo, Charlotte has continued to love him (“my mother never fell out of love with my father”) and has never felt the need or desire to love another man. When Charlotte disposes of some of his possessions, Alma rescues an old sweater and decides to wear it for the rest of her life. She manages to wear it for 42 days straight. Alma is on her own quest: to know her own father better, to help her younger brother Bird to know him too, to find a lover for her mother and to learn more about her namesake in “The History of Love”. In the midst of this assortment of delicacies, Charlotte receives a letter asking her to translate “The History of Love” from Spanish to English. Family Plot I have included the above plot details, despite my normal reluctance to summarise plots in reviews. Please don’t construe any of the details as spoilers. Most of them are revealed in the first forty pages, only not necessarily in that order. And I have left out a lot of the back story, so that I could set up this context, that family is fundamental to the plot, to “The History of Love”, not to mention history itself. The Paleontological Detective Every crime needs its own detective and every detective needs their own methodology, even a child detective. Nicole Krauss twice mentions the task of paleontologists. “Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist. “The only difference is that paleontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life. “Every fourteen-year-old should know something about where she comes from, my mother said. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of how it all began.” Here, the historical quest, the puzzle depends on your perspective. And there are two, the young and the old, the present and the past joining together to construct the future. For Alma, the young, the puzzle is what happened before “The History of Love” found its way into her family? For Leo, the old, it is what happened after he wrote “The History of Love”? Both have to sit down, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently, and work their own methodical way towards a solution of their own puzzle. In a way, their problem is the same: the problem of family. Leo loses a (prospective) wife and a son, Charlotte loses a husband, Alma loses a father. They have all lost the story of their family, of their love. Here, the novel is symbolic of the fate of the Jewish Family in the face of the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora. The Jewish Family has been dispersed all over the world, family members have been separated, the spine of their love and connections and cultures and books and stories has been severed. Their book has been shred into a hundred pieces and cast into the wind. Somebody has to scour the world, to find the surviving “scraps”, piece it all together again and reconstruct their history and their culture. And it will take a paleontologist. Or two. You Can Only Lose What You Once Had Leo once had Alma. He had a lover whom he loved and who loved him. He lost her, but he kept his love alive, just as he hoped that the object of his love was still alive (she actually lived until 1995). The novel is almost mythical or mythological in the way it tells this tale. Charlotte tells young Alma: “The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma.” So Leo and Alma are almost posited against Adam and Eve as the first boy and girl, the first to have mortal parents, the first children who ever fell in love with each other, the first to create a new family. Without the object of his love, he wrote about it. He kept his love alive, his love kept him alive. As he wrote in his own obituary, “He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.” And yet. His life stalled when he lost the object of his love. He ceased to live for any purpose other than the preservation of his love. His love became a fabrication that substituted for and subsumed his life. He appears to be in two minds about this: On the one hand, what more to life is there but love? “I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said….What is more than her love? I asked.” On the other hand, he recognised that he needed his invention in order to survive, that reality would have killed him. “What do I want to tell you? The truth? What is the truth? That I mistook your mother for my life? No. Isaac, I said. The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.” And again, his confrontation of the truth: “The truth is that she told me that she couldn’t love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don’t know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.” And: “And now at the end of my life, I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.” Perhaps, the truth is whatever works for you. “My Friend Bruno” Leo constantly refers to his friend Bruno. I have only one head, but I am in two minds as to whether he is real or make believe. He might be a self-generated survival tool. He is modelled on Bruno Schulz, the Polish author of "The Street of Crocodiles", which is referred to a number of times in the novel. He died in 1942, and Leo even mentions that he died in 1941 in the novel. He attempts suicide in the novel, unsuccessfully, so there might be a sense in which he is a darker twin of Leo, who nevertheless manages to prolong his life (in the same way Zvi Litvinoff manages to prolong his life by confiscating and caring for Leo's obituary when he seemed like he was about to die). His role diminishes as Leo embraces reality over the course of the novel. “And Yet” And yet. “And yet.” These two words are so important to the novel. They express Leo’s defiance, his determination not to accept the hand dealt to him, his determination to avoid and evade the evil and the crime and the misfortune around him. It is his imagination, his ability to believe in something else that allows him to achieve this: “I remember the time I first realised I could make myself see something that wasn’t there…And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe…So I tried…And I found I could.” He has to imagine a better world than the one he has inherited or the one that his world has become. It was his love that enabled him to stop thinking and worrying about death, to stop worrying about the inevitability of his fate. To this extent, love is what keeps us alive, it is our heartbeat, it is the reason our heart beats (even if occasionally it causes our heart to skip a beat). Love is the defiance of death. It’s not just something we do while waiting to die, it’s something that keeps us alive. It keeps individuals alive, it keeps families alive, it keeps cultures alive and it keeps communities alive. Putting Your Legacy into Words The great tragedy within Leo’s life after Alma is that he believes his greatest creation, “The History of Love”, has been lost. In fact, it has been misappropriated, albeit without ill will. Again, I don’t mean this to be a spoiler. We, the readers, already know that it must exist in some form, if Alma’s family can read it and Charlotte can be asked to translate it from Spanish to English. Obviously, part of the resolution of the puzzle for Leo must be the recovery of his legacy. It is one of the things that will bond him with the family he had (but wasn’t really able to have). The other thing we find out at the beginning of the novel is that Leo has had a heart attack that has killed one quarter of his heart. This reinvigorates his fear of death and the concern that he might die an invisible man, survived only by “an apartment full of shit”. And yet, it also reinvigorates his creativity (which had stalled as well). Within months, he starts to write again, 57 years after he had previously stopped (possibly when he had finished "The History of Love" and had become an invisible man during the War?). What he writes ends up being 301 pages long, “it’s not nothing”. It’s his memoir, starting off “once upon a time”, in the manner of a fable or a fairy tale, which he almost calls “Laughing and Crying and Writing and Waiting”, but ends up naming “Words for Everything”. It’s a polite, but defiant, retort to Alma’s childhood challenge, “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?” Maybe there isn’t a word for everything, but as “The History of Love” itself illustrates, in the hands of the right person, it is possible to say everything in words. Leo sends the novel off to the address he finds for Isaac, in the hope that he will read it, only to read soon after that his only child has died. (view spoiler) Alma Singer What more can I say about Alma? She might not be blonde, she might not be beautiful, she might not be full-breasted (she's only 15), but she is an angel. Whereas Leo is contemplative to the point of occasional melancholy, Alma is an inquisitive, optimistic, dynamic, witty breath of fresh air (perhaps, it's the way she flaps her wings?). Her contributions to the story come in journal entries with numbered headings. (I like that!) And yet, it has to be said that her detective skills alone are not sufficient to lead her to the denouement of this fable. In the end, she realises that she has been searching for the wrong person. She might be the pointer to the future, her symbol might be the compass, but she is unable to find true north alone. If only because she wasn’t present when a crucial phone call was made, the story needs her brother Bird to intervene, just like a “Lamed Vovnik” would do. (Note: look it up like I did!) Her contribution ends up being a family affair. Lucky for her. Lucky Alma. Lucky Leo. A+L The last section of the book departs from the Legend at the beginning of this review. Instead, it is headed with the inscription “A+L” that Leo carved into the tree in his childhood. Each page is narrated alternately by Leo and Alma Singer. (view spoiler) At this most crucial time, you would think that there wasn't a word for everything, when in fact there was only one word that would suffice: "Alma". More happens, but I’ll deal with that under the SPOILER ALERT heading. Suffice it to say that the novel affords Leo some last joy. And who among us could deny that he earned that joy? SPOILER ALERT (view spoiler) Dedication This review is dedicated to the memory of Abe Lebewohl (the founder of the Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan) and to my daughter who turns 16 today and who lost her father in Manhattan and still hasn’t found him again...And yet...he laughs and cries and writes and waits...