In the third session of the book club [Wednesday, 21st May], we read American novelist Nicole Krauss’ second novel The History of Love which was published in 2005. Whilst it is difficult to satisfactorily summarise, The History of Love, ostensibly, tells the story of Leo Gursky: a man alone [apart from his friend Bruno], towards the end of his life, living close to a son who doesn’t know him and a woman, Alma, whom he has never stopped loving, despite a period of long and fraught separation. This narrative strand crosses in the novel with that of a young girl [another Alma, named after the first], whose mother is translating a novel called The History of Love.
The History of Love is highly wrought [both emotionally and formally] and one of the first things we discussed in the group was its complexity. Some people in the group were put off by the novel’s complex structure which works in several time periods, locations and characters [not to mention at least one ghost], that are sometimes difficult to hold apart from each other. Certainly, The History of Love is a novel that makes you work for the plot. Others in the group, however, were sufficiently engaged with the novel to want to read it again and found that, the second time around, the novel had plenty more to offer. This led into an interesting discussion where we thought about the ways in which readers might invest, to a greater or lesser extent, in the ‘what happens’ of a novel.
One of the novel’s plot twists involves the character Bruno, friend and neighbour of main character Leo Gursky. The novel tenderly and acutely depicts friendship and the intimacy that comes from knowing someone from childhood into old age. From there, we moved in several different, all equally productive, directions. We talked, intermittently, about the novel’s depiction of loneliness and its effects, and the ways in which Leo Gursky anatomises and embodies this loneliness and other emotions, locating, for example, ‘disappointment in myself: [in the] right kidney’. We then moved into a close reading of a moment at the beginning of the novel where Leo prepares himself to be a life model, a scene that reveals much about The History of Love’s preoccupation with themes of recognition, in/visibility, and the ways in which being alone for long periods might undo the divide between having a sense of oneself as a subject or an object. Finally, in connection to this scene, we thought about how drawing might render the body and one’s relationship to it in certain ways. The session closed with a more general discussion of the idea of identity and language [particularly Yiddish] in The History of Love. What happens to the continuity of identity, for example, when one stops using the language of one’s childhood and starts to speak in a different tongue?