The History of Love

The History of Love is a complex but intensely moving novel written in the most brilliant prose. In a very real way it's a story about life, about humanity and above all about the multiplicity of disjointed events and emotions which constitute the business of simply living. It was my good fortune to come to Nicole Krauss's book after I'd only just finished reading yet another account of the grotesque obscenities perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews in the run up to and during the Second World War.

Those terrible events provide a constant background to The History of Love. But as the title implies the book is also a story about love and longing, nostalgia and hope ... eternal hope even against all odds and all reason.

Leo Gursky is obsessed by the memory of a book and of a love. He'd been born in a Polish village and when we meet him sixty years later he is unable to put out of his mind the book he wrote and the love he knew. He clings to an existence which seems framed entirely by the past. The predominant event of that past is that his book survived. It's HIS book of life.

Krauss's characters are wonderfully drawn against an ominous background of dark, despicable deeds. Here's Leo's account of that backdrop in language with is at once spare and unsparing. 'The Germans pushed east. They got closer and closer. The morning we heard their tanks approaching, my mother told me to hide in the woods. I wanted to take my youngest brother, he was only thirteen, but she said she would take him herself ... I ran out to the woods. I lay still on the ground. Dogs barked in the distance. Hours went by. And then the shots. So many shots. For some reason, they didn't scream ... Afterwards, only silence ... I never went back.' This is followed by the chillingly telling line: ' I never went back. When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life.'

In all this there is an uplifting tribute to the meaning of true friendship. Leo and his neighbour Bruno develop a system to keep tracks on each other. Leo would tap on his radiator to tell his friend he's OK. This simple expedient serves as a metaphor for the much more complicated business of maintaining one's sanity and staying alive in the most trying circumstances. Thoughts of death and dying are never far away. When Leo's uncle dies he's left in a room with the corpse. ' My uncle was laid out on a slab of stone the color of raw meat with white veins ... It wasn't only him I was afraid of. I was afraid for myself. In that cold room, I sensed my own death.'

This work of magnificent imagination rushes headlong to a dramatic finale.