Title: The History of Love
Author: Nicole Krauss
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company 2005
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 252
Rating: 3/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Perpetual (21st Century Women Authors); Modern Mrs. Darcy -- Recommended by Someone with Good Taste; I Love Libraries
A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book…Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
I really really wanted to like this book. It's our book club selection and I've heard so many great things about it. I loved the final scene between Alma and Leo. I loved the mystery of the novel and the characters' pasts. And yet, I just couldn't find myself to love this novel. The format of pseudo-stream of consciousness and enumerated memories threw me off. I kept getting lost as to the multitude of characters and their perspectives. I even found myself confused by the time period on certain pages/chapters. I can see that this is a worthwhile book and I'm sure that there are people who love this one. That person is just not me...
Next up on the TBR pile:
