Nicole Krauss: The history of love

How many times can the history of love be written? This is the question at the heart of Nicole Krauss' second novel. The mystery begins with Leopold Gursky, "the oldest man in the world", a man so afraid of dying unnoticed he becomes addicted to calling attention to himself in public, whether it's purposefully spilling his popcorn at the movies or knocking over a pharmacy display of K-Y Jelly. "All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."

Despite successfully hiding from the Nazis for three and a half years in Poland, Leo Gursky believes his life to be unremarkable. Yet, it is only until he is near death that Gursky discovers that the novel he wrote for Alma, the only woman he had ever loved, has touched some lives. How did the manuscript Gursky entrusted to a friend in Poland end up being translated from Yiddish into Spanish and published in Chile by a Zvi Litvinoff? This is one of a number of puzzles at the centre of Krauss' elaborate plot.

When Gursky reaches New York, he discovers he is too late. Alma — having left for America before the war — moves on to begin a family with a man who will raise Gursky's son as his own. Having lost his entire family to the Holocaust, his first and only love and his novel, there is nothing much left for Gursky to do but to "vanish completely". However, with all the attention-seeking antics he performs in his latter years, Gursky is anything but invisible.

Moving on from cantankerous and self-deprecating Gursky, we meet Alma Singer, a precocious and ultra-polite 15-year-old, who is preparing a book of her own called How to Survive in the Wild, a curious pursuit for a girl who lives in Brooklyn. She is named after the main character in Gursky's novel, a book her father finds in Buenos Aires. After Alma's father dies of cancer, she becomes obsessed with finding a partner for her grieving mother. The key to her mother's happiness, Alma believes, is connected to the stranger who requests her mother's translation services for a novel called — you guessed it — The History of Love.

There is nothing original about writing a novel within a novel. However, Krauss deftly interweaves an interesting array of characters. The voice of a phlegmatic octogenarian alternates seamlessly with that of the awkward innocence of a teenage girl. There are times when Krauss' intricate plot is in danger of being considered too far-fetched and Gursky reads like a caricature of an ageing stand-up comedian. The History of Love is, nonetheless, an endearing, mesmerically layered tale, which goes to show Krauss is much more than just the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer.

 

* Gail Bailey is an Auckland reviewer.

* Penguin, $35