The History of Love

[May 18th, 2005] Leo Gursky has lost everything-love, the son he never knew, and a manuscript, The History of Love, which he wrote as an idealistic youth in Poland before fleeing the Nazis. Now he has aged into a crotchety old New Yorker who's awaiting a heart attack and imagining his obituary: "Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit."

Then there's 14-year-old Alma Singer, who copes with the death of her outdoorsman father by writing her own book, How to Survive in the Wilderness: Volume Three, and wrapping herself for days and days in one of his old sweaters.

The third character in this quirky fictional threesome is Zvi Litvinoff, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Chile, where he published Gursky's manuscript under his own name. Alma's father discovered the book during his travels, then gave it to his wife, who named their daughter after its protagonist.

Gursky, Singer and Litvinoff are the central characters of Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, an elegiac novel named for its book within the book. Overall, the novel works to navigate the intricacies of human emotion, balancing its themes of loss and recovery with subtle wit, as embodied by the character of Alma's mother, a translator commissioned to translate Gursky's book from Spanish back into its original Yiddish. When the mother explains the family's origins to her daughter, she employs such detail that their ethnic family tree is translated onto the page as 16 circles.

Krauss' novel is at its most engaging in its believable characters. It less successfully negotiates Gursky's fictional book at its center, which Alma reads, one chapter at a time, as her mother translates. The writing in these chapters, from "The Birth of Feeling," about the first time mankind discovered emotion, to "The Age of Glass," when humans discovered their "extremely fragile" parts, seems as sentimental and disappointing as a Hallmark movie.