Nicole Krauss

I didn't love this book and I'm always a bit upset when I don't care for a book that most everyone else loves. It makes me feel the need to apologize. (Sorry Liz!) On a positive note, I really liked the character of Leo Gursky but his life was unbearably sad. I can't get the thought out of my head that he was "disappearing" from lack of love. I think that must be one of the saddest things I've ever read. The author really does give you a lot to think about though, which should have made me love the story, so I guess I'm just in the market for happier reading these days. A great quote from the book ... "There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late." Too bad unfathomable things always seem to be horrific. Wouldn't it be great to apply the quote to something good; then when it becomes too late and we have no choice, something happy and good would be forced upon us.… (more)

_History of Love_ is the First Nicole Krauss book I have read, though I am looking to my left to see _Man Walks into a Room_ staring at me from underneath my book of Russian short stories I am currently indulging in.
_History_ charmed me, but it also bored and confused me. I understood what I was getting into when I picked it up: a non-linear timeline, an unusual plot, charts and graphs and possibly unusual typography. Those are, in fact, reasons I picked up this book. I enjoy all those elements when they are necessary to telling the story, and it allows more options to understand the author's intent, and to connect to my own life: also non-linear, etc.

Frequently I found myself wishing for an editor with a stronger pen to cut out- not chaff, exactly- but elements that left the reader lingering too long without impetus to read more. I got that "drifting-at-the-horse-latitudes" feeling too often from about halfway to two-thirds through the book.

The story Krauss tells is one of searching, without necessarily knowing who or what you're searching for, though you think you do. It is also a story of what we do to survive emotionally, psychologically in a world in which all do not survive. And it is a "Rosebud"-esque mystery, as we wander through the characters' lives, figuring out how the book within the book has shaped their lives.

In the 24-7 honor-system library at the small Vermont college I attended, a giant portrait hung inauspiciously across from the 700's. At the bottom was written [paraphrased]: There is no measuring the impact of the right book on the right mind at the right time. (I would look around me at all the marvelous books around me and wonder which one was *my* book.)

_History of Love_ is, in a way, a slightly Borges-like exploration of that statement: how a book, like a person or an event, can alter the course of your life and connect you to all the others who have also been altered by it.… (more)