The History of Love

This novel by Nicole Krauss is in some ways a typical Jewish-American novel, but has a few original elements which has led it to being lauded as a masterpiece; that’s overstating it, but it’s got a couple of interesting twists which keep you reading. It follows two characters; Leo Gursky, a holocaust survivor who lost his love and his son to chance, really, and who is trying to find some kind of meaning in each day, and Alma Singer, who is trying to do the same through a book of her mother’s, “the history of love”. And of course through various twists and turns the two characters’ journeys end up intersecting and becoming one and the same thing.

There’s the usual little quirks in the characters, some fairly clever language, some poetic and myth-like qualities to the story. It didn’t really draw me in, however, partly because the quirkiness leads to a lack of intimacy with the characters, a kind of coldness. It’s well written, but it’s not my kind of book.