The History of Love

1. The tragedy of lost opportunities is what makes most stories sad; but being unaware of this tragedy is what makes them effectively poignant. And poignant was the life of Leopold Gursky, who unknowingly was robbed authorship of a novel called The History of Love; he entrusted it to a friend and was betrayed without him ever knowing. Further he was estranged from his own son who grew up to be a famous writer and died searching for his father--something our old guy was also not fully allowed by the fates to know.

Needless to say, Gursky grew old living alone, and prepared himself to die alone. In his wallet was an index card that says: MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. The thing is that, "He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

2. Krauss balanced the heavy drama in Gursky's life with the charming innocence with which fourteen-year-old Alma Singer, named after the beloved in Gursky's novel, tried to search for the author of the novel that his father gave her mother as a gift. The excerpted chapters ("The Age of Glass," "The Birth of Feeling," "The Age of String") from Gurksky's novel are equally delightful, almost poetic, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in their mythic texture.

3. Of course Leo loved to read, as did Alma. He devoured Anna Karenina, Ulysses, the works. Meanwhile, the young girl's hero was Antoine de Saint-Exupery (whose The Little Prince was read to her by her father when she was six). Leo's son, who pretended to be his own character in able to search clues for the whereabouts of his father, wrote to Alma's mother: "You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished The Street of Crocodiles for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful." One time, Alma caught her mother reading Cervantes, "the most famous Spanish writer," her mother claimed. These are people whose lives are somewhat occupied by literary works, lives in which literature still has some power.

4. A little mention of the Philippines, through Alma: "Henry Lavender... told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he'd dove for himself on trips to the Philippines." I would not even go to issues of legality; it was fiction, obviously, and worse crimes happen everyday. But moments like this, no matter how brief, or precisely because they were brief, reveal so much of how a nation is commonly condensedly perceived from the outside. This one: apparently driven by a vision of the country as of tourists, some place to go to when you need to collect things.

~ After Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005)