If I break into a crying jag ONE MORE TIME while I'm working out on the elliptical, I'm gonna have a conniption, which won't help the crying jag one bit! This is all my friend Eve's fault because she keeps recommending tearjerkers. Not sappy maudlin ones, but tender, revelatory tales of the danger and beauty (and yes, the history) of love.

Nicole Krauss ends her novel on such a poetic, jubilant note that the last 20 pages alone were well worth the somewhat circuitous, yet captivating route to get there.

The History of Love seems to be, almost until the last page, stories of those with aches they cannot mend, holes in their souls they unsuccessfully try to fill. The title comes from title of a book that resurfaces throughout the novel.

Leo Gursky, now old, as a teenager survived Nazi horror but lost his girl to another man and traveled his life as a locksmith who wanted to write but didn't...except for his book The History of Love. Alma Mereminski loved Leo but married another when she thought that Leo was dead; their child was raised not knowing Leo was his father. Zvi Litvinoff publishes a book not his own to maintain the love of a woman he feels he does not deserve. Charlotte translates to pay the bills and longs for her deceased husband, closed off to future love. Alma Singer labors to keep her small family together by finding ways to make her mother Charlotte happy. Her brother Bird suffers a deep father wound, is socially awkward and fantasizes the impossible. Bruno is Leo's oldest friend, or might be someone created by Leo to stave off complete loneliness. There are others, Rosa, Zvi's wife, and Julian, the unhappily married uncle of Alma Singer. Each has a story.

The History of Love is admirable with its depth of character, its travels from the past to the present and back again, and its haunting prose. It defies being captured either by dissection or overview. The book is better suited to a book club discussion; it is a rich story. Throughout the characters remain attached to pain that keeps them from being whole, from moving on.

Would I change something? Possibly there are too many characters. Is uncle Julian essential? I also don't think that having only a few words on a page is good technique, although the short interplay between Leo and Alma Singer near the book's end does succeed.

You have my permission to read the book. Enjoy!

This book was unbelievable. It was quirky, and sad, and happy and honest. I loved everything about it. There are quotes in this book that are absolutely timeless. I couldn't put it down.

My sister recommended this book so I was eager to read it only to find that I was only interested in the present involving Leo. When the book switched, I lost interest and did a fast forward to Leo in the present again. I usually persevere with books and try to read the whole book but with this one, I felt like it was too much of a slog to finish it. i gave up and moved on to another book.

First, I have to say that this was one of the more difficult audio books to follow. A simple distraction in traffic left me tuning back in to the story saying, "Wait...who is that talking now?" Since it is told from multiple perspectives, and they feel different from one another in the beginning, it was often hard to follow each of the stories. To be honest, I just wanted to hear more of Leo's story. The writing is beautiful, and the images that are drawn up amazed me. I found myself agonizing over Leo's happiness, hoping and praying that this beautifully complex character found the joy he so desperately deserved, before he died. In a culture where we sometimes side step the story of the aged, I found Leo's experiences to be telling, and to show how the actions and experiences of one's life can influence one's philosophy on aging and dying.

While complex and beautiful, this story took great care to weave the lives of multiple characters together in a very satisfying way. In an effort to not give away the ending, all I can say is that the entire story feels like it's waiting for the ending of the story, when the reader can see all the plot points finally slide together. Altogether, I found the story haunting, revealing, thought-provoking, and beautiful. Difficult at times to follow in audio, the novel was one that needed careful attention. I genuinely appreciated and enjoyed The History of Love, and would readily recommend it to any serious reader.

This is an outstanding, intricate and beautiful expression of several exceptional lives and their fight to conquer ultimate loneliness.

A wonderful look into the need for relational connectedness in the human heart and the power to survive that comes from the memory of these connections in the past and the hope of finding another someday. Brilliantly endearing prose and a fantastic story. I laughed out loud multiple times and found tears impossible to hold back in a few spots. Wonderful work!

Enjoyed this book. Great conversation for our book club. Not necessarily a page turner, so may not be the book for every reader.

Confusion was the overwhelming reaction to our book club's reading of A History of Love. As a result, our discussion was a series of explanations about who was who rather than the themes, characterization, etc. of the novel. One of the members felt it necessary to read the novel twice and took notes in order to make sense of the plot and the characters.
On the positive side, several of the characters were engaging - namely, Leo, Alma and Bird. Leo's circumstances made us sympathetic to him as he fought to remain visible in the world. Alma and Bird's struggles to grow and mature as they were overwhelmed by their mother's grief were causes of sadness to us.
We decided that the author was attempting to remind readers of the Holocaust so that we would "never forget." However, requiring readers to jump from Nazi Poland to New York City to Chile while keeping track of each character's relationship to Leo Gursky obscures the theme and lessens the impact of the story.

You must read this book.

I am a voracious reader. I am a bibliophile. I read and read and read, and I own many, many books. But, even before I finished this book, I knew it was going to be my new favorite work of fiction. Ever.

This is a magical piece of work. It has some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read in my life. If you are a romantic, a lover of language, a poet, or simply a fellow reader...buy this book. Now.

THE HISTORY OF LOVE is both entertaining and just a bit pretentious.

The characters in the novel are quite compelling. Leo Gursky and his pal Bruno are both sad and funny. Leo, a retired locksmith and survivor of the Holocaust, is a lonely old man, but he's always out there trying to prove he still exists. Bruno is a boyhood friend whom he meets on the street one day; they embrace like long lost brothers. From then on out they take care of each other. Although he doesn't know it, Leo is a survivor. At one point in the story he signs up to pose as a nude model and actually carries it off. Alma Singer, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, also has her moments. Her mother is a sad, depressed lady still grieving for Alma's dead father, and Alma wants to find her a mate. When her mother gets a job translating THE HISTORY OF LOVE from Spanish into English, Alma sets out to find her mother's employer whom she considers a likely catch and in the process begins searching for Alma, her namesake from THE HISTORY OF LOVE.
Then there's "Bird," Alma's younger brother who thinks he's one of the 36 possible Jewish messiahs alive at the time. He earns his nickname jumping off a building to see if he could fly.

As a young man Leo wrote a book entitled THE HISTORY OF LOVE featuring his lover, Alma. The journey the novel takes is almost as engrossing as the one Leo undergoes as he emigrates at the end of WWII only to discover Alma is married.

We get to read excerpts from THE HISTORY OF LOVE as Alma's mother translates. It's pretty much pseudo philosophy. Nicole Krauss also happens to be Jonathan Safran Foer's wife, and she has some of the same bad habits he has. Towards the end of the book, Krauss alternates characters, giving each a little dialogue on each page, much the same as Foer did in EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, but at least she doesn't include any pictures of Trade Center bodies falling up.

The ending is also a bit rushed. One of the reasons all that white space is so annoying is that you don't want to let these characters go, and Krauss leaves too much to the imagination. There's also a twist (concerning Bruno) toward the end that I thought was completely unnecessary.

Be prepared for confusion; this book weaves in and around you until the end when all of the storylines come together. Be prepared too to live in the aging skin of Leo, the main character. Krauss is a beautiful writer; my book was filled with highlighted passages that I felt compelled to remember!

Few books have moved me like this one. It is achingly sad and achingly beautiful at once. The characters are rich and quirky and interesting. There were pages where I gasped out loud, pages where I cried.

It's important to know that the story is told by multiple authors and that the symbols at the beginning of each section indicate which author is speaking. I read the book twice to get the most out of it. This is not an easy read, but it's well worth the effort.

After reading a recommendation for this book, I decided to check it out. I found it confusing and annoyingly quirky. The characters were all isolated loners. Very depressing.

I think that the literary analysis of this book has been adequately covered here; this review is purely personal.

The History of Love is moving, thoughtful, beautifully written. This book stands out in a way that inspires me to share it, and I keep several copies on hand to give away when people ask for book recommendations.

Nicole Krauss- please publish another novel soon. The wait is arduous.

I was given the book as a gift by my boyfriend. It's a beautiful story and I highly recommend it. The reason I give it a 4 instead of a 5 is because there are times that you need to flip back to connect certain people and time periods that are mentioned so much later in the book. This is due to the fact that it is three separate stories written so you follow each every 3rd Chapter. But the stories do eventually entwine. It's best to read the whole book in one sitting, but I didn't have the time for that, thus the necessity of flipping back and forth to make sure I was connecting the right people and places as the stories unfolded.

What an interesting book! It had it all, an absorbing story, characters you cared about, humor, and emotion. I was hooked from the beginning and crying at the end!

Can you imagine, say for instance, if you yourself undertook the writing of a book with such an ambitious title?
The History of Love.
First guy: "So hey..... umm, what are you doing today?"
Second guy: "Not much. Just working on a book called The History of [frigging] LOVE!"

For one thing, there is no such thing as a history of love.
There are only many histories of loves.
And each "history" -- each story -- a unique, and inexplicable, one.
The relevance so internal, is what I mean.
Your love for another, for your loved one, your beloved -- only you yourself can know what it all means, if put into words.
Those words would be inadequate.
If at all meaningful to anyone outside of the relationship, terms would have to be generalized -- you would end up writing a philosophy of love, because anyone reading your work would not have truly experienced the unique thing you are describing. At best, they would know [or imagine] a vague approximation.

The History of Love is a difficult book.
Read a few reviews. You will see. It is not for the faint-of-heart.
If you need a potboiler, don't go here. You're going to be waiting a long while to see any percolation, much less modest bubbles... never mind the lid rattling.
A few times I wanted to abandon the thing. It's difficult. Almost like a real love-relationship, there is nothing simple about it. But I have discovered tonight [having finished the book mere minutes ago] that, as with a healthy love-relationship, patient tenacity will be worthwhile.
Stay with this book to the end.
The pieces you don't think are fitting, will.

It's stopping in the middle that would be a mistake.
Like a painting that means little in the first ten minutes.
In the eleventh, it all hits you.
As with history, so with love.
To stop partway through is to miss the beginning.

I read this book 2-3 years ago and it still stays with me as the best book I've read in many many years -- I loved it cover to cover and can't even comprehend how anyone could give it anything but 5 stars. Truly a magnificent work.

Beautiful story, well written, engaging, heartbreaking and lovely. Overall, one of my favorite books of this year.

Nicole Krauss's THE HISTORY OF LOVE (2005) would have been better titled THE HISTORY OF STUPIDITY. Much like her contemporaries, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, Krauss approaches her readership with contempt (i.e. a set of low expectations). Most Americans, after all, are gum-chewing television-watchers who have never picked up a book in their lives. I certainly do not believe this tiresome cliche, but the American publishing industry does. And so does Nicole Krauss.

Krauss panders. She explains everything to the reader. In the end, the reader feels insulted for being treated with such contempt. I am not fooled by the novel's pretensions at experimentalism (this is NOT a formally challenging novel). Yes, we are presented with three interlocking narratives: one written by an old man, another written by the woman he loves, and the other by a fourteen-year-old girl. But the plot is hideously simplistic: An old man writes a book inspired by his inamorata, Alma. The book gets away from him. Alma reads the book. Fin.

Krauss has mastered the marketing strategies of her husband, Foer, who also uses the interlocking narrative structure, a superabundance of nearly-blank pages, and narrators who are functionally illiterate. In the end, THE HISTORY OF STUPIDITY feels like a self-advertisement --- not so much an advertisement for the author as an advertisement for itself. Much like the object of SUV commercials, the target audience here is painfully clear: Typical Dumb Americans who find sweet old men and little girls stupidly charming.

Not merely is the novel infantile in terms of its form; the content is also similarly stunted.

Particularly stunning are Krauss's scatological obsessions. I am not suggesting that books should not have scatology as their subject matter, nor am I attacking the book on some pseudo-moralistic, Medvedian ground. H.G. Wells assailed James Joyce (whose name is showcased, pointlessly, twice in this novel) for his so-called "cloacal obsession." But if there is scatology in Joyce, it serves a "transcendent" purpose. In Krauss, however, the references to excrement point to nothing other than themselves. Nothing is more infantile than gastrointestinal humor.

And so we have Leo Gursky struggling with a bowel movement on page 15, "Zvi Litnivoff" defecating on page 69, and a tzaddik in an outhouse engaging in one of the "coarse miracles of life" on page 127. I could go on, but I don't want to. Nicole Krauss seems fascinated by excrementality, which seems appropriate since her book is a steaming mound of yellow horse dung.

One last thing: If Leo Gursky has written such an important book, why are all of the passages cited halting and puerile?

What we are witnessing is the "dumbing-down" of literary fiction. We need a new constructivism (I do not use this word in its traditional sense), after three decades of infantilism in American letters.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

I like a good convoluted story. I like to figure out what's going on. I liked Leo and contemplating his loneliness. I don't like profanity. I could have really enjoyed this story without the profanity and a couple of uncomfortable scenes. I'm old-fashioned. If you are too, I'll save you the discomfort of reading this book.

so sad and happy and full of words. and. yet. life! it made me cry.
the loss and the life and the loneliness and the love and madness.
a little slow to tango, but ultimately shockingly beautiful.

I needed the book for a class in college. It came quickly to my dorm and does not even look used at all

The History of Love is quite frankly one of the best books I have ever read. Leo Gursky is a character that I am fairly certain exists in real life and his story is powerful, enchanting, lovely and sad. I loved this book soo much. It's a very interesting and wonderful book that everyone should read!

An interesting concept...though the coincidences seem a bit contrived ultimately. My favorite part of the novel was Leo's voice. And yet....

This book was good but it was a little confusing the way things bounced back and forth between characters all of the time. Sometimes this works in a book (My Sister's Keeper) - but other times it doesn't.

The premise was good and overall was well written - I just didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

What a quietly moving and thoroughly spell-binding novel Nicole Krauss has written in The History of Love. The first several chapters in, I thought the book was going to be some good character sketches, but without much of a plot. While I was enjoying the characters just being characters, I failed to notice until much later the fantastic subtle web of interconnection that had been woven around these characters, and had ensnared me to see it fully unfold. It's been said that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. The History of Love tells of a young writer who pours out his first, fleeting yet lifelong love into an unpublished manuscript, and how it touches the lives and loves of others across two translations, three continents, and seven decades. And of how choosing the wrong sentence might change the course of a lifetime. The book made me think of Love in the Time of Cholera, as both are epic paeans to a lifetime of love (mostly in the abstract), their pivotal characters carrying an enduring unrequited love for a girl who marries and spends her life with someone else. But where Florentino Ariza spends his life whoring around, Krauss' hero Leopold Gursky spends his life writing. Gursky thinks no one will read his pages, but he has no idea how far-reaching his impact will be. In the end, he touches the lives of others more profoundly and positively than Garcia-Marquez' hero. Of course one doesn't expect much of Gursky when we first meet him, as a cranky, eccentric old man. But as his story unfolds, I grew fond of him, crankiness and eccentricities and all. His story comes out interleaved with the coming of age story of a teen girl and her younger brother dealing with the loss of their father when they were very young, and the story of a Jewish refugee and writer in South America. And perhaps the story is even more about the girl than about Gursky. While the novel jumps from 1930s Poland to 1960s Chile to contemporary New York, I found the narrative flow surprisingly natural and not too hard to follow, especially as the latent threads running through the disparate stories begin to manifest. Krauss' intricate story is brought to life by her ear for voice and her vivid characters. By the end, I was rapt in its magic web.

I absolutely adored this book which I did not expect at all. After my disastrous experience with Love Walked In I was really expecting to hate this book. Krauss immediately drew me into the story of the characters and the mystery behind all of their stories. The chapters alternate from being told by three different characters in the book and the difference between each character's storytelling methods really gives the book a 'real' quality to it.

I'm not so sure "The History of Love" is about love as much as it is loss...or maybe searching for loves that have been lost. It's a sad but beautiful book about people trying to regain and understand the most important relationships of their lives.

During most of the book, I felt lost myself. I knew the plot lines and characters would somehow come together...but always felt like I was about 2 steps behind the author. Which was OK, and in some books it's not - I just want to throw the book down in frustration. But in this, sometimes a feeling is expressed so well, that I found myself nodding in agreement.

"Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine."

Krauss takes on a major challenge in her characters...she voices a World War II survivor, a fifteen-year old girl, a twelve-year old boy and a few others...and makes them authentic. Their voices are very clear and very convincing.

From Leo, the old man: "If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us - we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language."

He's experienced such grief, such horrors in his life that he was never able to fully live it.

"After she left, everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There was 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."

He remains trapped in the past, searching for that which he lost, and creating the answers that he can, either through words or imagination.

While I believe Leo is truly the main character of the book, for it is about him that the major revelations are made - I was drawn more to Alma, the girl who is searching for answers about her life after the death of her father. Where Leo has had many years to search and reflect and live, she is still trying to find a way in the world, some idea of how to become her own person.

Her voice is at times so childlike and bewildered...but there is an underlying strength that leads one to believe that given time, she will get where she needs to go.

"It wasn't that far, so I decided to walk, and while I did, I imagined rooms all over the city that housed archives no one had ever heard of, like last words, white lies, and false descendants of Catherine the Great."

There are not many answers to be found in "The History of Love"...but the questions that are asked and the way they are phrased should be familiar to us all. Is the end of a search finding the answers or the way that we change while we are searching? Will we ever truly find that which we seek or will we become someone whose life is defined by our journey?

"And then I realized that I'd been searching for the wrong person. I looked into the eyes of the oldest man in the world for a boy who fell in love when he was ten."

Or is the search for love the one journey that defines us all?

The History of Love was a selection for a book group. It clearly split this group down the middle. Readers either loved it or found it boring.
This is the narration of a man's life through war, love, loss and enlightenment. He discovers that a story he wrote for the woman he loved has been published by a younger man many years later. As he searches to remain a visible presence in the world, the elderly locksmith seeks out the truths that seemingly lock themselves out of his reach.
There is also a very young woman looking to obtain information on who she has been named for.
The tale entertwines itself in a way that makes it nearly burdensome.
The people that loved it, loved it a lot and defended it vigorously.

I read this book a year or two ago, and then just finished it again a couple of weeks ago while I was on a 15 hour plane trip.

I love this book, I'm 21 and recommend this to anyone in almost any age group. I think it is enjoyable and entertaining and heartfelt. I got so wrapped up in it that after I finished, I didn't read anything else for quite a while. This is why I love Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer. I've read all of both of their books and each one leaves me with the same feeling. This book has so many tiny references to Foer and to his books and I underlined each one. I think it's sweet that she acknowledges him so many time in this precious story.

The story is easy to fall in love with and keeps you interested. I will probably read it again before too long, and keep passing it along to my friends and family. It's worth any money that you would have to spend on it.

If you read any book this summer, let it be this one. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will read it again. It's beautiful. Bravo.

This was an assigned reading for an English class I took. I, and everyone in the class loved it, men, women, of ALL ages (18- about 60). I loved it so much, my dad is now listening to it on CD.

What a moving piece. This poetic mystery of human connection rekindled my love of reading. Fantastic experience.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl. The History of Love is far from what you expect it to be - it is not a simple love story about two people falling in love, breaking up, getting back together and living happily ever after. It's far from that , actually. The History of Love is a beautifully written intricate tale of the fate of two very different strangers and how their lives connect. It takes you from Nazi invaded Poland, to current day New York City. Story number #1 centers around Leo Gursky, an old, old, old Jewish immigrant just trying to live until tomorrow. He reflects often about a girl he loved back in Poland and wants to be remembered. Story #2 shows young Alma who is trying to make her mother happy and fall in love. Her mother, a book translator, lost her husband, Alma's father, many years ago and her only companion is an old book called "The History of Love." Knowing that, Alma tries to find information about the book. The story is heartbreaking and beautiful. You're involved in it up to the very last word. In a book where many stories take place, all separate, it's amazing how they all connect together lovingly in the end. I'm really excited to read every other book Krauss wrote and will write.

I'm always a little put off when a first-person narrator is the opposite sex from the author. Still, I managed to embrace Leo Gursky, a Holocaust survivor, and got a sense of his personality, thanks in part to his one- and two-word sentences, such as "And yet." Plus, the narrator's voice flips between Leo's and that of Alma Singer, a teenage girl who's into survival techniques. Alma is named for a character in a book which her father, now deceased, gave to her mother. Now Alma's mother is translating the book from Spanish to English for a man named whose identity remains a mystery until the end. The stories of Leo and Alma Singer start to become intertwined when we find that Leo had a girlfriend named Alma in Poland, who preceded him in fleeing to the U.S. There's also Bird Singer, who thinks he's possibly the Messiah and earns his nickname by trying to fly. The story is convoluted but in a good way. At the end, I wanted to wrap this book in a big, warm hug. Also, the fact that there's a minor character who is apparently imagined made me want to read it all over again.

Some good things can be said about this novel. It is a book about a book, which always puts me in a positive mood.

The title hero of this book, the book 'The History of Love', was written in Yiddish by a young man in love, in Poland at about the start of WW2; first published in Spanish in Chile by a friend of the original writer, a journalist refugee Pole in Valparaiso; one copy bought by an Israeli in Buenos Aires, who gave it to his English wife, who read it to their American children in New York; the mother translates it into English, and the English text somehow finds its way to the attention of now 79 year old retired locksmith Leo Gursky, who wrote it 60 years ago for Alma, who later became the mother of famous writer Isaac Moritz. The daughter of the translator is called Alma Singer. Maybe you hear the bell ring at this moment, the bell of allusions.

So we have history (WW2, Holocaust) and literature and love and fate. This is all very well, but: the plot is impossibly complicated. One might, in a bad mood, call it pretentious (some have done that).
Another flaw: the plot has two narrators, Alma Singer, 14, and Leo Gursky, 79. Both contemporary in New York. And both sound like teenagers. There may be system behind that, but it is not convincing. Let's face it, the narration sounds like 'young adult' fiction.

Should a young writer nowadays even try to tackle such a complicated and complex 'historical' subject? I have serious doubts about that. It is very hard to be 'original' about these subjects. There should be a very good reason to go there again. I do not see that very good reason in this case. And I am a friend of simplicity anyway. Making a plot more complex does not make it better.

Based on the reviews, I was looking forward to reading this book. I was hoping it was a classic on the scale of Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep." But it was not. The story was bland, and the characters were flat. It was not well written. What a disappointment!

This started off very slow for me. It had me quite perplexed, actually, because generally speaking, I either love a book or hate it. And this had me doing both. I would read twenty pages of pure literary brilliance, and then would be bored to death and struggling through it. It wasn't a book that had me rushing back to read, but it was definitely worth it in the end.

A lovely read that you should give a fair chance to redeem itself.

I was given this book as a gift, and I'm not at all certain that it is a book I would have bought on my own. And I have to admit that after I started the book, I was a little annoyed. Yet Another novel written by a hip young writer from the POV of an aging Holocaust survivor. How many of these can be written before we approach some kind of critical mass of ridiculousness?

Anyhow. I quickly forgave Krauss for this. She's a smooth and skilled stylist, and there was something really engaging about the work that made me forgive my initial doubts. For the first half of the book anyhow. There were several places where she could easily have pulled her punches or descended into sentimentality, and she did not.

In the end, I'm still not sure how I feel about the book. It was a decent reading experience and there were moments where I was really moved. It is, at least, not a *bad* book.

Or, mostly not a bad book. For all the things I liked about it, there was one thing that I really really hated. I found the occasional experimentally formatted chapters (they get much thicker towards the end) to be annoying, overly precious, trite, pointless and... well... annoying some more. It felt the opposite of organic and much like trickery for trickery's sake.

Anyhow. Good things and bad things. On balance, I'd probably end up somewhere like "disappointed" based on how the pretentious formatting crap took the air out of the tires.

This is a great book. Krauss writes fearlessly about love and death. The pursuit of love and the avoidance of death are the two big impulses behind most of our activity on earth, and are the two big themes of literature, as well. Krauss writes in a whole new way about the joy and the sorrow, the hope and the fear, that go along with love and death, and she adds in something beautiful: how we use words to try to control both love and death, to further our happiness, stave off our misery, and find a bearable truth in the sometimes unbearable reality of living. Despite the heavy themes, there is a good deal of humor and good-natured spirit in "The History of Love". It is a survival manual of sorts, not so different from the "How to Survive in the Wild" guide treasured by one of the characters in the book.

All the characters in the book have known death, the truth of which they are trying to deal with, and love, the pursuit of which they have run from or are fully engaged in. They use words -- as Leopold writes, "words for everything" -- to avoid the truth or to confront the truth of death, and to find for themselves a safe place for love to be. Words in the book are translated, they are hidden away, they are plagiarized and they are revealed: through all the manifestations, the words are powerful. And when the words are too powerful, gestures take over the role of communication: one tap (no) or two taps (yes) to convey answers to a lifelong question. Is love worth it? Two taps.

"The History of Love" is the story of Leo Gursky: "He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life." And it is the story of every person affected by the book he wrote for the woman he loved: the friend who lost everyone and to find someone again, stole the story; Alma, the woman who starred, again and again, in the story (she is the soul of the story, as "alma" means soul in Spanish); the son who had the story read to him and only too late comes to understand its significance; a different Alma, trying to help her mother find love again, trying to help her brother Bird be normal and not be a chosen one, and trying to understand the life of a woman who left Poland, leaving love behind, and began love and life all over again.

Krauss' characters range in age from very old to very young, and include the dead who live on vividly in memory. They are all distinctly drawn as very real humans, with fear and sadness, desires and weaknesses. The ones left alive have a will to survive, some stronger than others, and their unfailing strength to pursue a path they do not completely understand -- to finally share the book written about "everything", to plant a garden, to go to a house in Connecticut, to attend a funeral, or hunt through old city records in a series of dusty offices -- will, in the end, bring them knowledge and maybe even some peace, before the end.

This is a life-affirming, heart and tear duct pumping, and even funny at times, wonderful book about the power of words. The power comes from the people who write the words, the people who inspire the stories, and the people who read the words, becoming inspired themselves. "The History of Love" is joyous song in favor of the mind and the heart and the body and the soul, and the celebration that occurs when all four work together, the celebration called love.

For more reviews, go to www.readallday.org

Somewhat confusing to figure out who is who and how they
relate to one another. Interesting characters. Thoughtful look
at aging alone. At times funny, but mostly sad and thought
provoking.

So, there's lots of reviews telling the plot of the book, I'm sure you know by now or else you could scroll up and read Amazon's description.
What I'm going to tell you is that Krauss and her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, are changing literature, for the better.
They are the contemporaries, and they will become the classics. their books are layered with incredible literaray devices that weave philosophy, character studies, unique imagination and analysis on writing itself, into a giant beautiful ball. These books need care and study to fully unravel, just like the classics we read today in English classes.
Those who oppose this book, and Foer's books, oppose progress, imo, and are afraid of change. Embrace their techniques, even if used in overabundance (ask why they would do that, ask why they change narration so often, etc.), embrace their characters (ask why they are so unrealistic and so relatable), and most importantly embrace their imagination.
This book, or Everything is Illuminated, should be required high school reading.

A book about the way memory is carried across generations, how threads are dropped and picked up, how we write one another's stories, as well as our own.

An old man, most of whose life has slipped away from him: his family dead in the holocaust; his childhood sweetheart married to another man; his novel, a labor of love, lost; his biological son unaware of his existence.

A young teenage girl, emotionally neglected by her widowed mother, missing her father who died of cancer, riding the ups and downs of clueless teen dating, scientifically minded and obsessed with "how to survive in the wild," desperately trying to fix her mother's sadness and her younger brother's mental health problems.

Two exquisitely sad stories, connected by a thin thread that gets thicker and thicker as the novel develops, coming together in a luminous, redemptive ending, where the old man learns that his life has not gone unnoticed. Though he may have experienced his life as "unlived," his life actually continued and wove into the lives of others through the medium of writing.

Normally, I read the first chapter of a novel and flip to the end. If knowing the plot makes me feel done, then I know the writing and ideas haven't engaged me. But The History of Love tricked me: I couldn't even understand the ending until I read the whole book! And that kept me going, even at points where I wondered in frustration when and how the pieces would come together.

This is a beautiful book for anyone who loves to write, for anyone who is interested in holocaust literature, in memory, in experimental fiction.

The author's command of the different voices is uneven; it can't compare, for example, to Barbara Kingsolver's work in The Poisonwood Bible. But Krauss is a young writer, who has crafted a work of great depth and complexity. I look forward to reading more as she writes more.

This was the first novel in 10 years that I wanted to re-read immediately after finishing it the first time through. The prose is remarkable and the story touching.

The History of Love is by far my favorite novel of the year. Every word is packed with emotion and meaning. Krauss's writing is spare and lyrical. I found myself laughing out loud and crying hard enough to reach for a tissue, sometimes both emotions occurring within pages of one another. Leo's Yiddish/NY "voice" is astonishing; I felt like I was there with him. The conclusion, when young Alma finally meets Leo, will absolutely melt your heart.
One of my favorite passages occurs when Alma and Bird's mother takes them to the movies and Bird eats his entire package of Milk Duds before the end of the opening credits, runs up and down the aisles on a sugar high, and finally collapses in the front row. A few pages later, Leo attends his son's funeral and finds a photo of himself with Alma, his childhood love in Poland. The description made me weep.
Please read this book! You will look at the world differently, I guarantee it. And, you will appreciate life more.

There's not much to say that hasn't already been said. I'll keep it short. The last few "chapters" alone are worth the read, and may be the most powerful, thought-provoking, beautiful and haunting twenty or so pages in contemporary literature.

I cannot believe how many people have claimed that this book is "confusing" and yet also claim that they didn't finish it. It's a book. That means you have to read it all the way through to truly understand it. If it's a good book, that is. Which this is.

Of course it's going to seem a bit confusing at first, and even more confusing towards the middle, but that's where the excitement lies in good novels, especially in a novel like this. It keeps you interested and curious and intrigued.

I read this book in a single sitting because I just couldn't put it down. I wanted to unravel the mystery and discover the connection between all of the characters and, of course, the point of the book.

It's a beautifully told story, and the ending is fantastic. An ending that really does justify all the confusion that populates much of the book.

For those who passed judgment on this book before having finished it, I urge you to give it another chance. This is definitely one of the better novels to come out in recent years.

I'm left scratching my head at the critical acclaim this book has received, although if you start looking, there are many middling-to-bad professional reviews out there. What disturbed me most about this book is the way it plays fast and loose with historical truth. If you are going to invite historical characters -- real people -- into your book, such as Isaac Babel and Franz Kafka and Bruno Schultz, you had better do your research. What Krauss writes about these people is misleading. Babel disappeared and certainly died in the Soviet prison system, but what his last days were like is certainly not known. And Kafka, who published very little in his lifetime, would have been unknown at the time of his death, and so the celebrity "obituary" she inserts in the book is puzzling and misleading.

That aside, I agree with many of the reviewers here that Gursky's story, especially in the beginning, has potential, but ultimately that potential is never lived up to. The characters feel flat and stereotyped; it is hard to connect with them. The "novel within a novel" which is also titled _a History of Love_ isn't gripping or magical at all, like so many of the characters insist -- it actually reads pretty poorly, isn't very well-imagined, and at times seems downright silly. I'm all for magical realism, but a kind of magical realism that *earns* the suspension of your disbelief, that presents a fully-imagined new world. This isn't that kind of writing.