Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
"All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."Leopold Gursky, Holocaust survivor, is a lonely old man who dreams of his long-lost love Alma Mereminski and survives each day with the desire to just be noticed by someone. He has one single soul he can call a friend in this world, Bruno, his “old faithful”. Alma Singer is a fourteen year old girl who lost her father and whose heart aches for the mother that can barely get out of bed and make it to the next day - "My mother is lonely even w...
Original Comments (Pre-Review):I would like to review this novel more formally in the near future, but to do so I'll have to flick through it and refresh my memory.My reaction at the time was that it was one of the best novels I had ever read.Nicole Krauss understands people and love and feelings and she writes about them in a word perfect way.As a reader, I am prepared to go wherever she wants to take me. I will trust her judgement.I have recently watched a few of her videos and interviews on Y...
I need to cut the crap with my preconceptions. Although I almost unfailingly launch into a new novel with great enthusiasm like a kid on Christmas morning, anxious to discover what hidden treasure awaits, for some reason I held out little hope for Mrs. Foer’s book about a book about love. Maybe it’s because books about books about love aren’t usually my thing? Maybe it’s because I read her husband’s bestseller last year and was less than impressed? Maybe it’s because I had heard somewhere that t...
Have you ever felt so moved that it's as if you're possessed? Reading The History of Love was like having my chest cracked open, the words flooding into me.Some passages I loved:The floorboards creaked under my weight. There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ashtray from the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, an empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder,...
The great tragedy of life is this then, our friends are not allowed to finish their stories. My second reading of this book bore out my feeling the first time I read it. The first two hundred pages are a stunningly beautiful and moving account of love and loss and the stories hidden within stories and then, of a sudden, it’s as if Krauss handed the novel over to her distinctly less talented husband to finish off the book. She ruins it with the fourth of her narrators, the entirely preposterous w...
One of the last books I read in 2017 was Virginia Woolf's A Room of One Own. In this series of essays, Woolf maintains that if a woman has a room of her own in which to write, then she is more than capable of producing the same if not greater works than men. While pondering my 2018 classics bingo and what book to use as a free square, my thoughts turned to Nicole Krauss. I finally discovered Krauss last year, having read both Great House and Forest Dark. The prose in both novels was superb, lead...
One of the most beautiful and saddest “experimental” love stories I’ve ever read. I’ve had this novel on my TBR since January 2014, a very long time. The main reason it stayed there was the author’s ex-husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. I did not enjoy his book Everything is Illuminated and I wrongly presumed that I will not like History of Love either. A stupid idea, I know, but from the description it felt similar. Both are Jewish authors writing a book with multiple plot lines and the blurb also
Another book about everlasting love? How many times has the issue been discussed to death? Thousands. And yet. This book is about a rare kind of love; a unique one that is fathomless and can only be expressed by the delicate hands of a virtuoso that reveals in the silences between words left unsaid, between the commas and the semicolons. Because an emotion as deep as the love depicted in The History of Love cannot be pinned down by conventional language. Gestures, the aid of several senses worki...
Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. They both live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and they both write clever, critically acclaimed novels featuring preciously innocent narrators, magical realism, and some safe postmodern "experiments" (blank pages, pictures, excessive repetition, etc.) that you'd notice just by flipping through. I loved Foer's Everything is Illuminated, liked his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close okay, and liked Krauss's History of Love a little less. I'm wondering now...
Being MovedIf you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer. I mean no disparagement by saying that nobody does Holocaust survivor-tragedy better than she. The old man in the empty Manhattan apartment whose pregnant Polish sweetheart had left him years ago for America, and whose closest contact with his son is at the son's wake is tragedy with punch. As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relatio...
This book was promising at the beginning, but proceeded to get sloppy and puzzling, and then ended in an unsatisfying and unclear way. It's a convoluted plot involving a Polish Jew who falls completely for a childhood girlfriend, writes a book about her, and then is separated from both by the Holocaust. Not knowing the book was eventually published by the friend to whom he gave it for safekeeping, he now lives his old age in New York, lonely and waiting to die. His story is interwoven with that