31 Days of Books: History of Love

I've talked about this book a lot, so I thought I should give it a proper review.   It will also be forever connected, in my mind, to yesterday's book because I read them in an Honor's Seminar on "Memory, Emotion, Space, and Place" - in which my final paper was on how the human mind copes when lacking interpersonal relationships... anyway, it was a very interesting class and these two books are very dear to me because of it.

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Title:  History of Love

Author:  Nicole Krauss

Published:  2005

Year I read it: 2011

One sentence summary:  A "beautifully sad," multiple-narrator novel about an aged and lonely holocaust survivor named Leopold Gursky and the lives his writing unknowingly changed--including his own.

Interesting fact:  Krauss incorporates Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles in her novel, a book which her husband, fellow NYT-bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer, literally carved up to form a new book, Tree of Codes.

Three reasons to read it:

•  Leopold Gursky.  He remains one of my favorite characters - romantic, tragic, comic.  I love his grumpy self.  And his writing... his writing is like a romantic poet's, but without being pretentious; it's like a post-modern's without being depressing.
• This is a writer's mystery novel - working out the tangles Krauss has woven takes 4 narrators and several intriguing twists.  [After reading this for class, my professor had us each create a chronological sequence of events - only a few people were accurate, and I didn't pick up everything until a read-through] 
• This book is "beautifully sad" in a remarkable way.  It somehow is both happy and sad, but, overall, extremely satisfying.  Krauss's language, intertextuality, and symbolism is really lovely.

One reason you maybe shouldn't:

• Some adult content.

Great quotes:

"All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."

 When I saw a Starbucks I went in and bought a coffee because I felt like a coffee, not because I wanted anyone to notice me. Normally I would have made a big production, Give me a Grande Vente, I mean a Tall Grande, Give me a Chai Super Vente Grande, or do I want a Short Frappe? and then, for punctuation, I would've had a small mishap at the milk station. Not this time. I poured the milk like a normal person, a citizen of the world, and sat down in an easy chair across from a man reading the newspaper. I wrapped my hands around the coffee. The warmth felt good. The next table over there was a girl with blue hair leaning over a notebook and chewing on a ballpoint pen, and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

“Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair.
Once 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.” 

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.” 

"When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?"

"Life is a thing of beauty and a joy forever."