"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering..."
But then the war came. The girl was sent to America while the boy learned how to be invisible in order to survive. To follow his love. Fast forward five years, the man who had become invisible stood face to face with the only woman he would ever love, and then walked away. She bore him a son, but married another. She thought he was dead. So for the rest of his life, Leo Gursky lived for one reason alone - his son, Isaac, who never knew him. He watched him from afar, trying to survive just a little longer for him. But then he even outlived Isaac. Now at 80 something, he's making a habit out of being seen, too afraid to die without anybody noticing.
"The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma..."
Alma Singer is fourteen. She lost her father when she was seven, and since then her mother had been "lost" to the world. But she needed her mother to be not sad. And her little brother, Bird, too, who thinks he might be the Messiah. So when a mysterious letter arrived, asking her mother to translate a book that had been her father's, she takes on an adventure to find her namesake, after whom every girl in the book The History of Love was named. She thought maybe she could find a husband for her mother, who never fell out of love with her father, and maybe save her family.
And that's about it. That's the story. But I'm not even close in capturing the essence of this remarkable novel by Nicole Krauss. It's not a huge book. barely 300 pages, with some not even taking up half the space. And it's the best i've read in such a long time. Well, the Half-Blood Prince and The Historian were both fantastic reads. But this one is, to quote people who praised the book, "charming, tender and wholly original," "It restores your faith in fiction. It restores all sorts of faith," "It requires tenderness without being overly sentimental." It would even be made into a movie, apparently to be directed by Alfonso Cuaron.
It's a tale about love and loss, life and death. And everything that comes in between. It's not the kind of book where you skip pages and miss nothing. Not because it's fast paced or plot-driven, but because every word matters. It's where the heart of the book lies.
"There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead. Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human."
The book The History of Love, which Alma's mother translated from Spanish to English was originally written in Yiddish, 60 years ago in a Polish village where the real author of the book, Leopold Gursky, grew up and fell in love. He wrote it for the only person whose opinion he cared about - Alma Mereminsky. He thought the book was lost in a flood. But it survived- it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives.
