What happens when we find love and how do we cope with its loss?From Amazon:
A story within a story that crosses generations and countries with a Jewish WWII experience in the backdrop/origin. The story spans a period of over 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. At the center of each main character's psyche is the issue of loneliness, and the need to fill a void left empty by lost love. Leo Gursky is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. ("I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty.") Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer vacillates between wanting to memorialize her dead father and finding a way to lift her mother's veil of depression. At the same time, she's trying to save her brother Bird, who is convinced he may be the Messiah, from becoming a 10-year-old social pariah. As the connection between Leo and Alma is slowly unmasked, the desperation, along with the potential for salvation, of this unique pair is also revealed.
With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together the stories of Leo Gursky and 14-year-old Alma. This extraordinary book was inspired by the author's four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss — Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.
Leo Gursky is barely surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: 60 years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn't know it, that book survived; inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love.
I thought this was kinda cool (it's described in the book):
Universal Edibility Test (when finding food in the wild, how do you know it’s not poison?):
1. Don’t eat for 8 hours.
2. Divide the plant into its parts: roots, flower, stem, leaves, and bud.
3. Test a crushed piece of plant on the inside of your wrist.
4. Place a crushed piece of the plant to the inside of your lip for 3 minutes.
5. Hold a crushed piece of plant on your tongue for 15 minutes.
6. Chew a piece of plant for 15 minutes – DO NOT SWALLOW.
7. Swallow a piece of plant and wait 8 hours.
8. Eat ¼ cup.
9. Then it is edible
“Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
“Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and low and behold, genius comes and strokes you.”
“I was a locksmith. I could unlock any door in the city but I couldn’t unlock what I wanted.”
“It was years before I’d spent all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half a minute.”
Loneliness – “The immigrant who can’t speak English and is afraid of being depressed.” He keeps a copy of a one-night stand’s key to “pretend” he has a girlfriend.
“In my loneliness, it comforts me to think that the world’s doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me.” He then refers to Jews who can’t stay invisible forever, “Show me a Jew that survives, and I’ll show you a magician.”
“Forgive me, you mother didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, perhaps I didn’t love her the way she needed either.”
“This is how they send the angel, stalled a the age when she loved you most.
“Bruno – he’s the friend I never had, the greatest character I ever created.”
“It’s strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions.”
“This is part of the history of love, too.”
The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
Discussion Questions from a website:
1. Leo Gursky and Alma Singer make an unlikely pair, but what they share in common ultimately brings them together. What are the similarities between these two characters?
2. Leo fears becoming invisible. How does fiction writing prove a balm for his anxiety?
3. Explore the theme of authenticity throughout the narrative. Who's real and who's a fraud?
4. Despite his preoccupation with his approaching death, Leo has a spirit that is indefatigably comic. Describe the interplay of tragedy and comedy in The History of Love.
5. What distinguishes parental love from romantic love in the novel?
6. Why is it so important to Alma that Bird act normal? How normal is Alma?
7. When Alma meets Leo, she calls him the "oldest man in the world." Does his voice sound so ancient?
8. Uncle Julian tells Alma, "Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it." How does this philosophical take on the artistic process relate to the impulse to write in The History of Love?
9. Many different narrators contribute to the story of The History of Love. What makes each of their voices unique? How does Krauss seam them together to make a coherent novel?
10. Survival requires different tactics in different environments. Aside from Alma's wilderness guidelines, what measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?
11. Most all of the characters in the novel are writers–from Isaac Moritz to Bird Singer. Alma's mother is somewhat exceptional, as she works as a translator. Yet she is not the only character to transform others' words for her creative practice. What are the similarities and differences between an author and a translator?
12. What are the benefits of friendship in the novel? Why might Alma feel more comfortable remaining Misha's friend rather than becoming his girlfriend?
13. The fame and adulation Isaac Moritz earns for his novels represent the rewards many writers hope for, while Leo, an unwitting ghostwriter, remains unrecognized for his work. What role does validation play in the many acts of writing in The History of Love?
14. Leo decides to model nude for an art class in order to leave an imprint of his existence. He writes to preserve the memories of his love for Alma Mereminski. Yet drawings and novels are never faithful renditions of the truth. Do you recognize a process of erasure in the stories he tells us?
15. Why might Krauss have given her novel the title The History of Love, the same as that of the fictional book around which her narrative centers?
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