The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, is a book within a book within a book. Like a matryoshka doll set, when you think you discover what the book is really about, you find this other smaller book inside the previous book you’ve thought you were holding. And another one, smallest, inside that new one. They keep on showing up. And that is the most fun about reading this book.
Yes, a book gets lost and found and the love story told by its trajectory is heartbreaking. Several other parallel love stories are also endearing, as love stories ought to be. But the true crush that is chanted in this tale is love of a craft. Why people write? Why am I doing this right now? I don’t know, I just know I would die if I didn’t. A lonely, sad, miserable and slow death. But, no, I write, therefore I am human. And, I believe, just because of that, capable of love. Everyone can write, but not everyone can move their readers into another realm like great, crafty authors can, not every author gets published, and many words go by unknown and unaccredited.
Nicole Krauss confessed, in a conversation with Andrew Sean Greer at San Francisco Arts & Lectures, that she wrote a couple little gems of pieces that were unique, enchanting, poetic, but did not sustain a whole story. And yet they originated a bestseller about a book that gets lost, found, translated and retranslated, and the life and the love stories that weave together around the movements of such book. Therefore, The History of Love was born out of an excuse: this once poet wrote two or three pieces that granted her (and readers) immense pleasure, and composed a whole book around them. Aha!, so that is how a poet becomes a novelist!
What follows is sort of a thriller about creating stories, writing, being able to express oneself, getting it or not getting it, letting go, never letting go. My heart sunk the heaviest when passionate misdeeds were committed in the name of telling a story (and winning a girl by doing that).
Nicole also said that she was the most grateful for being born into the English language. “We get read, we get translated, we get distributed. There are so many hugely good authors that no one knows about just because they did not write their work in English.” And this gratitude shows in her best selling (and widely translated) work. The History of Love is a saga about a story that was written in a minority language, in a dying town, and wished to be told no matter what wars, oceans, languages and misunderstandings it had to come across.
