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THE HISTORY OF LOVE

by Nicole Krauss ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2005

A most unusual and original piece of fiction—and not to be missed.

The histories of several unresolved, inchoate and remembered loves.

The first of the stories here is that of New York City octogenarian Leo Gursky, a Polish war refugee who came to America seeking Alma, the girl he had loved, who had emigrated before him. Following a bleakly funny opening sequence that sharply dramatizes Leo’s undiminishable vitality, and also reveals teasing details about Alma’s American life, second-novelist Krauss ( Man Walks into a Room , 2002) shifts the focus to adolescent Alma Singer, who’s edging cautiously toward womanhood while dealing with her unstable younger brother Emanuel (aka “Bird”) and widowed mother Charlotte (a literary translator). Alma’s memories of her late father, a cancer victim, take the forms of a fixation on survival techniques and an obsession with an autobiographical book (which Charlotte translates): a homage to another Alma, and the work of Holocaust survivor Zvi Litvinoff, whose resemblances to and connections with Leo Gursky lie at the heart of this novel’s unfolding mysteries. Suffice it to say that each of Krauss’s searching and sentient characters is both exactly who he or she seems to be and another person entirely, and that that paradox is expertly worked out as Krauss gradually reveals the provenance of the eponymous History ; the relationship that embraces Litvinoff, Gursky and the latter’s mysterious upstairs neighbor Bruno; and the woman or women they “all” loved and lost. These enigmas are deepened and underscored by the chaotic “diary” in which Bird records the apocalyptic fantasies that are at heart his own history of love and loss, another son’s search for another father, and an affirmation of the compensation for loss through exercise of the imagination that this brilliant novel itself so memorably incarnates.

Pub Date: May 2, 2005

ISBN: 0-393-06034-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

More by Chinua Achebe

by Chinua Achebe

THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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Bio Hazards

Amid the old-timers and stale knishes of Shalom Chai deli, Nicole Krauss makes an aloof, if amused, onlooker. We’ve come to Grand Street in honor of Leo Gursky, the lonely octogenarian who anchors her intricate second novel, The History of Love . Krauss, in flared jeans and Saucony sneakers, is not just too young and modern for this crowd but too soft-spoken as well. Her voice is barely audible as a hoary man in a yarmulke shouts, “Come on, when was the last time you saw a drunken Lubavitcher?”

Krauss got glowing reviews for her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room , followed quickly by a six-figure, two-book deal. So I ask her how she feels about writers’ succeeding wildly the minute they’re out of the gate.

“In general?” she asks. “I don’t know what it’s like for other writers.”

What about her husband, great-young-thing Jonathan Safran Foer? “That subject I’m not talking about,” she says firmly. “Not much to say on that front.”

She will, in fact, not utter his name within sight of a tape recorder. Can you blame her? She’s living beside a lightning rod, whose alternately hyped-and-reviled second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , has attracted much Schadenfreude. Put together, the power couple is easy to resent. She’s 30, he’s 28. Their debuts were nestled side-by-side on year-end best-of lists in 2002; this year they could well be again. Then there is the multi-million-dollar brownstone on three lots that they just bought near Prospect Park (its ornate bathroom is featured on the snark blog Gawker ). And there are the striking similarities between their two second novels, which few reviewers have failed to note. Mediabistro declared them “obviously collaborative.” (“Is it a cute postmodern joke?” the piece went on. “God knows Foer is fond of those.”)

Add to that Krauss’s own privileges: the isolated splendor of her Bauhaus childhood home on a Long Island hilltop; a precocious and suspended career as a poet; degrees from Stanford and Oxford; a stint corralling literati for a hip reading series at the Russian Samovar that must have yielded lots of writerly connections.

But what of it? Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected. More to the point, The History of Love is a significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best. Old Leo (a new entry in the Jewish-lit canon) nurses the loss of his true love, as well as his only son—a famous writer—and his own great manuscript. Krauss’s novel is emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense. It draws a career arc that may very soon surpass her husband’s, in book clubs (it’s a Today show pick) as well as Hollywood. (Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated comes out this fall, and Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón—of Y Tu Mamá También —is already laboring on The History of Love .)

The literary couple is a familiar phenomenon, and one notoriously unfair to the female member. Who is more famous, Paul Auster or his talented wife, Siri Hustvedt? Marianne Wiggins could be a great novelist, but will she ever field an interview that doesn’t probe her time in hiding with Salman Rushdie? Those who open up about it seem only to suffer more. When Ayelet Waldman recently confessed her undying lust for husband Michael Chabon, she became no less vulnerable than Kathryn Chetkovich—who wrote an essay, “Envy,” on her burning jealousy of her boyfriend, Jonathan Franzen. Aiming at liberation, both inevitably became so-and-so’s partner. That’s a dilemma Nicole Krauss is looking to avoid, and on the strength of her work she stands a better chance than most.

Krauss does address the smaller elephant in the room, the writer’s biography in general. She calls it irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. “A year ago I started reading a biography of [fabulist Jorge Luis] Borges. And I just closed it on page ten, because I realized I was not going to like the man. And if I didn’t like the man, the book was going to be tainted for me.”

Still, Krauss offers a selective biography. “I felt like I really did have the last real American childhood,” she says of an upbringing that actually seems a touch surreal. Her house-on-high in Old Westbury was built by architect Ulrich Franzen, and the Krauss family garden was laid out by an Olmsted. Her grandfather owned a factory that made precision gears; her father left the family business to become an orthopedic surgeon. As a child, Krauss—just as detail-oriented as her forebears—lived in a world of her own. For five years, she pretended to be a travel agent in a game called “Office,” organizing trips for fictional tourists. “One time my brother tried to be in the game,” she says. “The partnership collapsed in a month. It didn’t do to have more than one person involved.”

Well into her twenties, Krauss wrote poetry, which “felt like the great goal of the language,” she says. She wrote a poem about her uncomfortable bed, declaring, “Architects should try to live in their own houses.” She was a lot like The History of Love ’s 14-year-old narrator, Alma Singer, who wants to be a survivalist, compiles obsessive lists, and is an avid collector.

At Oxford, Krauss did her thesis on compulsive collector-artist Joseph Cornell. (Before she and Foer met, Foer put together a poetry anthology inspired by Cornell’s work.) Then she abruptly quit poetry. She wouldn’t show me any of her poems, having set aside what she describes as an impossible quest for poetic precision.

Still, her first novel had the feeling of being too perfect. It also left her distracted. “Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad,” she says. “I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.” What she needed was to take more chances. In writing the new book, “there was a real loosening of control. There was no end in sight, no synthesis at all until finally there it was.”

It’s tempting to attribute Krauss’s new risk-taking to her husband’s influence—even more so if you’ve read their new novels. “Did Krauss learn to be cute from her husband,” asked Entertainment Weekly , “both of whose books seem somewhat desperate to amuse?” Both books revolve around fathers, exiled from Europe, who have outlived sons they’ve never met. Both juxtapose precocious young narrators with eccentric old ones. Writing for the The New York Times Book Review , Laura Miller called these correspondences an “engraved invitation to compare and contrast.” The Village Voice noted with forensic suspicion a blue glass vase that appears in both books.

“These comparisons are laughable,” says Krauss, insisting the couple didn’t read each other’s proofs until the very end. “People find what they’re looking for.”

In fact, it’s clear that the writers’ passions (Joseph Cornell) and family histories (the Holocaust) ran parallel long before they met. As do their sensitivities: Like Foer, Krauss still seems a touch uncomfortable with the pigeonhole of “Jewish fiction.” Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, Krauss “wanted to have nothing to do with anything Jewish at all.” Even as we walk through the forsaken shtetl of the Lower East Side and Krauss points out a bialy shop Leo name-drops and housing projects he might inhabit, she insists that “Leo might as well have lived in Baltimore.”

But she’s clearly begun returning to that history: A few years ago, she began recording conversations with her grandparents. And she’s been honing a semi-fictional piece—a chapter on each grandparent—that she might publish someday. Critics make much of her book’s unremarkable dedication, “For Jonathan, my life,” but have yet to mention the accompanying one: “For my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.”

Krauss says that she shunned her heritage when she was younger because she was keen on “casting the line to a more foreign landscape” so as to distance her work from straight biography. She also notes that the hidden meanings of the most tantalizing material can sometimes be found in obvious places. Take that blue glass vase. “It was mine—a gift from my mom—and now it’s ours. It’s nice. I’ll show it to you one day.”

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BookBrowse Reviews The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The History of Love

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First Published:
May 1, 2005, 252 pages
Apr 2006, 272 pages
Literary Fiction
Mid-Atlantic, USA
New York State
Contemporary
Adult Books From Child's Perspective
Mid-Life Onwards
Dealing with Loss
Immigrants & Expats
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A most unusual and original piece of fiction - not to be missed. Novel

From the book jacket: 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's life is about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, he fell in love and wrote a book. And though he doesn't know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full—keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild—she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. Comment: Krauss says that The History of Love was inspired by her four grandparents (it is partially dedicated to "My grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.") and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss—Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. Book rights have already been sold in at least 20 countries. When asked how she found the right voice for Leo Gursky, she says, 'It was easy in that I just wasn't looking for it, or him. One day I had his voice in my head, and I started writing, and it turned out to be the beginning of the novel. Honestly, he feels like me. It was never a stretch to write in his voice; I never sat around scratching my head, wondering what he'd think or how he'd say something.....When I started, I'd decided to write a book with no plot. Devising plots didn't seem like my strength, which didn't bother me too much, since the books I love generally don't depend on them. For a long time all I had was Leo's voice. Then Alma's. I had these little bits of The History of Love which I didn't know yet were going to become a book within a book--they were just vignettes.' Note: Do not confuse Nicola Krause, co-author of The Nanny Diaries with Nicole Krauss, author of This History of Love - they are two very different people and two very different books!

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To Be a Man (NEW)
Forest Dark
Great House

The History of Love

Man Walks Into a Room
Description

New York Times Bestseller

Winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature

Winner of the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger

Shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize in Fiction

Shortlisted for the Médicis Prize

Shortlisted for the Femina Prize

Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn’t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And although he doesn’t know it, that book also survived: it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives.

Fourteen-year-old Alama was named after a character in that book. She has her hands full keeping track of her little brother Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah) and taking copious notes in her book, How to Survive in the Wild Volume Three. But when a mysterious letter arrives in the mail she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family.

In her extraordinary new novel Nicole Krauss has created some of the most memorable and moving characters in recent fiction. A tale brimming with laughter, passion, and soaring imaginative power, The History of Love confirms Krauss as one of the most remarkable writers of her generation.

Vertiginously exciting…vibrantly imagined….Krauss [is] a prodigious talent….Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps Ms. Krauss’s The History of Love moving (and keeps its reader off balance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides….Even at their most oddball, these flourishes reflect the deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft….Krauss’s work is illuminated by the warmth and delicacy of her prose.

The novel’s achievement is precisely this: to have made a new fiction―alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting.

The History of Love is a significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best….Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense.

Confirms the depth and breadth of [Krauss’s] talent.

Devastating….One of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one’s breath away.

Even in moments of startling peculiarity, [Krauss] touches the most common elements of the heart. In the final pages, the fractured stories of The History of Love fall together like a desperate embrace.

A witty, emotional and ambitiously literary work…populated with sharp, deeply sympathetic characters.

Wonderful and haunting…deftly layered…its mysteries are intricate and absorbing and its characters unforgettable….Not quite a thriller, not exactly a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust memoir, The History of Love manages to be all three and also something more: a breathtaking meditation on loss and love. It’s the sort of book that makes life bearable after all.

Moving and virtuosic.

The History of Love has perfect pitch and does its dance of time between contemporary New York and the wanderings of the Jews with unsentimental heart-breaking grace. [Krauss] also happens to write like an angel.

Astounding, moving, very funny…a joy to read. Leo Gursky is brilliantly drawn.

When Nicole Krauss published her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, at age 27, reviewers described her as a young writer burning with promise. Three years later, she seems to have proved them right…one of the most highly anticipated literary novels of the spring.

A beautifully constructed, frequently funny and ultimately moving tale…The History of Love unspools a number of disparate story lines―about a lonely Polish immigrant, a teenage girl, a grieving widow―and then delightfully pulls them together into a striking coherence.

An accomplished acrobatic feat.

Extraordinary….The History of Love is a complex, funny, sad, elegantly constructed meditation on the power of love, language and imagination….Krauss’s beautifully imagined characters are funny, rueful, smart and sometimes almost unbearably poignant.

[A] breathtaking sophomore novel….Luminous….Krauss is a masterful storyteller…of astonishing breadth….With luck, Krauss has many decades ahead of sculpting deliciously witty, complicated novels. Let’s hope she does.

A tender tribute to human valiance. Who could be unmoved by a cast of characters whose daily battles are etched on our mind in such diamond-cut prose?

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss…is a novel to remind you of the power of fiction―funny and sad and devastating and hopeful often all at the same time.

Brilliant….A most unusual and original piece of fiction―and not to be missed.

A literary riddle by a deft and canny young novelist.

Captivating….Krauss writes superbly.

Krauss has an impressive imagination and considerable talent…a memorable feat of storytelling, fine prose and heartbreakingly real characters.

[The History of Love] has all the components of enduring fiction: an idiosyncratic structure, a wise and searching voice, a series of embedded incidents that read like mystery.

Big, bold, twist-your-heart sad, kick-your-heels joyful―Nicole Krauss’s brilliant novel is as deep and multifaceted as love itself.

Krauss’s writing is so engrossing, at once so fragile and brittle and sharp and pulsing with life, and the voices she creates are so real, that we are quickly absorbed into this mournful yet ultimately life-affirming novel….Krauss has created a satisfying, fascinating work of fiction that is at once funny, poetic and mysterious. And in Leo Gursky, she has created a character that hobbles off the page and sits on the park bench next to you.

A bold, exquisite writer with amazing vision and depth. She is a risk-taker and a breathtaking prose stylist….The History of Love defies the facile. It is an experience.

Krauss’s novel is bursting with colorful characters, suspense, true love, and tenderness.

It’s hard not to care about these characters because they are painted with such tenderness and truth.

Breathtaking…

Deeply moving…irresistible….[Krauss] refuses to hold anything back.

In her graceful inquiry into the interplay between life and literature, Krauss is winsome, funny, and affecting.

Believe the hype. The History of Love is one of the most imaginative and engaging pieces of literary fiction of the past year (at least!).

Poignant, imaginative, funny and even suspenseful….A book that will steal your heart.

‘Beautiful’ is not a word to be thrown around lightly, but it is the first one that comes to mind in relation to Nicole Krauss’s second novel…her writing is flawless.

Leo’s poignant, often hilarious ruminations ring piercingly true, and they show beautifully showcase Krauss’s expanse imagination….[It] is a whimsical, wistful epic that gradually unbraids several intertwined mysteries, and the climaxes of both texts come together with an effortless click and a sigh of wonder…this is complex, inventive storytelling at its best.

The History of Love is one of those novels you want to reread the minute you finish.

The authenticity of the humour contrasted with the sadness is extraordinarily moving. Krauss is the real thing; The History of Love is a novel to be read and reread.

This wonderful novel is poignant, imaginative, funny, and even suspenseful….A book that will steal your heart.

A wonderful novel erupting with life…building to a perfect, heartbreaking end.

Undoubtedly the work of a formidably talented novelist.

Its primary effect is to warm and sadden the cockles of the heart.

For all the complexity of this book, it has the simplicity of pure emotion, and is a delight because of it.

Endearing. Krauss is an entertaining, humane and intelligent writer.

Captivating….Characters fly off the page and into your consciousness.

Poignant and evocative…the writing is beautiful, and the twists and turns keep you riveted until the last page.

Krauss’s complex Russian-doll structure demands―and repays―concentration. But the characters are so vivid and human that it never feels like hard work.

A new star in the literary firmament…one of the most touching stories you are ever likely to read.

Charming, tender, and wholly original.

The interwoven threads of this marvelous tapestry offer delights at every turn. The writing is gorgeous, and Krauss’s questing characters follow surprising and touching paths.

Nicole Krauss’s Leo Gursky is all voice―frisky, aching, jittery, stunning, heart-rending, irresistible. There’s nothing like his voice, nor will there ever be. A cross between I. B. Singer and Woody Allen, Kafka and Leopold Bloom, Nicole Krauss’s gripping new voice doesn’t work its way into the pantheon of American voices: it literally walks straight up to them and asks them to move over―or else it will haunt their living days and nights. And it does just that. You can’t shut it off, can’t put it out of your mind, can’t live without hoping to run into it again and again. Leo Gursky is here to stay. And we are the luckier for it.

The History of Love is such a unique and beautiful book, one I read with great pleasure quite literally from the first sentence to the last. It is a mystery, a prose poem, a meditation, a single answer to many questions. It is the kind of book one hopes to find but rarely does: a work that captivates, challenges, and consoles, all at once. Nicole Krauss is proof positive that great literature is being written today.

From the twentieth-century Jewish experience of dislocation, Nicole Krauss has constructed―with nods to Bellow and Singer and a kiss blown across the gulf of years to Bruno Schulz―a stirring, soulful novel that speaks to our won losses and loves. This book will break your heart and at once mend it.

The triumphant song of this book is that it is an obituary told in opposition to obituaries―we live on in our dark, tender, heartbreaking mysteries and even the anonymous moments resound. A tremendous novel that will wring out our tired hearts

A beauty of a book, totally alive, make with real energy and nerve and craft. It restores your faith in fiction. It restores all sorts of faith.

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The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss doesn't believe in giving her characters what they want in life. The History of Love swirls with people traduced, abandoned, misunderstood or simply forgotten. But here's the magic. The novel is also a tender tribute to human valiance and stoicism. And who could be unmoved by a cast of characters whose daily battles are etched on our minds in such diamond-cut prose?

Leo Gursky is a Polish Jew now living alone in New York. Sure he will die soon, the only thing he asks is that it doesn't happen on a day when no one has noticed him. He deliberately drops coffee cups in Starbucks and knocks over displays in the chemist, just in case. He carries a card inscribed with the words "I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION."

As a young man Gursky fell in love with a woman called Alma, but she married someone else. He's lived his life as a eulogy to their teenage love affair, but doesn't begrudge the apparent waste. Krauss creates uncomplaining people but her unique skill is to describe a brand of humility which never grates on our nerves. One character whose eyesight has been reduced to nothing more than a blur insists on taking photographs each day, just in case his eyes ever heal... "'So I'll know what I've been looking at.'"

Leo Gursky wrote a book about Alma, which he called "The History of Love". During the war he entrusted the manuscript to a friend but is told later that it has been destroyed in a flood. Many years afterwards, when Leo is in his eighties, a copy of his lost book is sent to a woman who has a daughter called Alma and a son who believes he is the Messiah. And so begins a literary who dunnit, who lost it, who stole it, where is it which is as satisfyingly intricate and twisted as a fine piece of cable knitting. Did Gursky's son ever know who his real father was? And how did Gursky's book, written in Hebrew, come to be translated into Spanish?

The History of Love is peppered with lost relationships and undeclared loves but Nicole Krauss is as mournful about the words which have gone unsaid as she is about the people who didn't say them. "So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: Iwasa beautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoo believemybodyismadeofglassI've neverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyself asfunnyForgiveme."

Krauss's obsession with language makes for a novel full of feeling but entirely lacking in sensuality. Her book has a curious kind of asceticism which sets it apart from its fleshier rivals. She evokes her characters' love affairs in terms of books, describing those volumes as "homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return... to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all." Her characters show devotion, but no passion. They accept what they have been given without raging about its unfairness. But the novel throbs with a vibrant and poetic intellect which thrills the mind, even if it leaves the body untouched.

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THE HISTORY OF LOVE

Reviewed by Reviewed by Janet Maslin

April 28, 2005

'There are two types of people in the world," one of Nicole Krauss's characters in "The History of Love" decides, "those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."

There are also two kinds of writers given to the verbal tangents and cartwheels and curlicues that adorn Krauss's vertiginously exciting second novel: those whose pyrotechnics lead somewhere and those who are merely showing off. While there are times when Krauss's gamesmanship risks overpowering her larger purpose, her book's resolution pulls everything that precedes it into sharp focus. It has been headed for this moment of truth all along.

One of this novel's many endearing conceits is that books are like homing pigeons. Zvi Litvinoff, a published author who plays a pivotal role in this story, has sent out 2,000 copies of "The History of Love," a book-within-a-book that contributes to the hall-of-mirrors sensation here.

He imagines what it would be like if those copies "could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all."

And while Krauss's "History of Love" is headed for wide popularity, Litvinoff's is an abject failure. Nineteen hundred ninety-nine pigeons vanish; only one mildewed copy attracts any attention. But that one disintegrating volume is enough to shape the destinies of everyone within Krauss's vibrantly imagined world.

It travels from Europe to South America to New York. It prompts plagiarism, fuels imaginations, makes people fall in love. It envisions whole new chapters in human history, like an Age of Silence during which hand gestures were the only means of communication. This was a time when the scratching of a nose could be easily misconstrued to mean "Now I realize I was wrong to love you."

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Book Reviews

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: Book Review

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Book Cover

I have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop.org and Malaprop's Bookstore in beautiful Asheville, NC. I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase merchandise through links on my site. Read more on my affiliate page .

Elderly Leo Gursky lost his great love when he was young and he has spent the rest of his life living with what-might-have-beens and watching her and her family from afar. Not in any kind of icky way but in a caring way. Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is named after all the women in a book entitled The History of Love . The book leads her on a quest that takes on more and more layers, as she first searches for happiness for her widowed mother and then she gets more curious about the people she finds.

I missed something here. I know so many people love this book, and I kept waiting to love it too, and then I got to the end. And now I’m sitting here watching my cursor blink back at me and I really don’t even know what to say.

I do have to say that I admire the narrators’ voices. They were all very distinct, from the twelve-year-old Jewish boy to his fourteen-year-old sister, to old Leo to the disembodied narrator, I knew who was telling each section with no problem. I have to admire the author’s artistry in pulling that off.

But everyone was just so sad and so alone. It got a little depressing. Even the twelve-year-old felt sad and alienated. He was faced with the choice of being true to his own nature and alone or burying a part of himself and fitting in and having friends.

I guess my problem might be that I tend to like my stories to be a little more linear. I can take some detours as long as I get to see how they’re going to tie in pretty quickly. But when there are several distinct plots roaming around a book and I don’t understand how they fit together until right at the end, I’ve pretty much given up and don’t care anymore. And I think that’s what happened to me here.

The book is beautifully written, so if that is a bigger draw for you than that linear plot I was talking about, I think you will like, or even love, this one.

Read an excerpt .

Find author Nicole Krauss on her website .

I read this for Bookish Ardor’s Off the Shelf Challenge .

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The Unidentified by Colin Dickey: Book Review

Dog On It by Spencer Quinn: Book Review

Alice at Heart by Deborah Smith: Book Review

Sounds horribly sad. Great review.

I know exactly how you feel. That's how I felt with Eat Pray Love. I kept waiting to love it but it didn't happen.

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The Pine-Scented Chronicles

Learn. live. love..

Bibliophile , Book Reviews

Book Review # 113: The History of Love

Author: Nicole Krauss Publisher: Viking Publishing Date: 2005 Number of Pages: 252 pages Genre: Historical, Postmodernism, Novel

Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer; tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn’t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And although he doesn’t know it, that book also survived: it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives.

Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that book. These days she has her hands full keeping track of her little brother Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah) and taking copious notes in her book, How to Survive in the Wild, Volume Three. But when a mysterious letter arrives in the post she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake, and save her family.

Star-Crossed Lovers

I have always been intrigued with Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. I don’t know. At first, it was the book’s title that caught my attention. The irst time I encountered the book, I was enamored by anything related to love (it was an episode). Other than the fact that it is included in the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, the author herself piqued me personally – she is the former wife of Jonathan Safran Foerr, another accomplished author of the Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close acclaim.

What does this book hold? Does it contain the mystery of love that I am hoping it would possess? It wasn’t what I expected it to be.

“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.”

Death is knocking on Leo Gursky’s door. Sixty years ago, he successfully evaded it when Adolf Hitler’s evil tentacles were spreading all over Europe. But there is escaping it this time. Alma Singer is a precautious 14-year old. She was named after a character in a book and now she can’t stop thinking about the Alma in the book. Then there is Zvi Litvinoff, Leo Gursky’s friend who is also a Holocaust survivor. He has a secret he has kept for years.

Three different storylines. Three different point of views. Three different characters. But they all converge in a wonderful tale, bound together by a mysterious book. It is a book about a young Polish man’s who fell in love with his childhood friend. The book’s title? The History of Love.

“I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.” ~ Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Nicole Krauss drew me in to her narrative in a way that I have rarely felt. I got lost in the story, so swept I was that I felt like I was part of the story. It is not just about the nostalgia upon which the story revolved from the onset but it was also from the tenderness of emotions that Krauss tried to provoke from me, from her readers. There is certainly something about the novel that has kept me riveted until the end.

The narrative draws you in with its rotund profoundness. Knitted into the plot are the relatable struggles of the primary characters. Krauss aptly depicted their everyday struggles, their triumphs and their tribulations. There are battles they win and then there are battles they lose. They experience failure and they experience love. They go through a flurry of incidents that remind the readers that they are humans. The human-interest facet of the story made it more appealing.

Nostalgia. The tenderness took me in but it was the overwhelming nostalgia that has aroused several emotions within me. The crests, the troughs that were carefully painted by Krauss showed that survival is not a destination but a journey. Simply put, it is about living one’s life to the fullest. Krauss reminded her readers that living is about stumbling and picking up the pieces. Life is about finding the will to go on, to move forward.

“At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.” ~ Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

The novel takes it a notch by defying the tenets of time and periodicity. There were references to the Second World War but there was also a strange yet beautiful mix of the present and the past. In Leo and Alma, the dichotomy between generations were shown. More importantly, this highlighted continuity, a subject that was subtly embedded into the tapestry of the story.

The History of Love is not your typical story about love, if it even falls within the purview of romance. It is a book that looks at love on a universal scale, love in all its form. It transcends the basic precepts of love which most romance books have prepped us for. The whole point of the story is about believing that everyone can give parts of ourselves to other people, not just romantic partners but to strangers, to friends, to the harried person we meet on the street every day. It its heart, The History of Love is a book that believes in the power of humanity.

The novel is a triumph of Krauss’ writing prowess. She prudently and sensibly constructed some of the most evoking lines. There was a lyrical quality to her writing that complimented the wonderful nostalgia the story was wrapped in. It was so harmonious. It flowed diaphanously from the start that it wasn’t until the denouement that the flaws begun to demonstrate themselves.

“I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even when I’m not thirsty. If the store is crowded I’ll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.” ~ Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Truly, The History of Love isn’t your quotidian book that deals about banalities. It is a book that reminds everyone about the beauty of humanity. The novel’s backbone is built on our yearning to be known and to be loved. It echoes that small voice in our hearts that desires one thing – that we be remembered by those we love. There is so much to the story that I can’t help but think about it weeks after I have read it.

Everything about the novel is superb. Nearly. The backstories, the writing, and the characters all intersected at a crucial juncture. It was all carefully weaved and imagined. For the first few hundred pages, it was pulsating. The intriguing ambiguity the novel was built on fueled my desire to finish the book. But the ending nearly undid all the majestic progress that Krauss judiciously assembled. The ending, for an amazing book, was… mundane. Not only was it mundane, it was perplexing.

Albeit the ending, The History of Love remains one of my most memorable reads. The genuine emotions it evoked placed it on a lofty pedestal that not many books can compare to. This makes me look forward to Krauss’ other works because I’ve read that Krauss has a distinct and mature way of approaching her subject. That says a lot.

About the Author

Krauss grew up in Long Island and started writing in her teenage years. Her first works were mostly poems. In 1992, she enrolled in Stanford University, majoring in English. She was an accomplished student, graduating with honors. She took up masters studies at Oxford University after being awarded a Marshall Scholarship. During the second year of her scholarship, she enrolled at the Courtlauld Institute in London, receiving a masters in art history.

Krauss successfully debuted with Man Walks Into A Room (2002), her first published novel. She immediately followed the books success with the publication of The History of Love in 2005. Her other works include Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017). She had several of her short stories and poems be published in different magazines and newspapers as well.

She was married to fellow author Jonathan Safran Foer (divorced 2014) with whom she had two children. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York City.

Vishy’s Blog

On books, reading and other delightful things, book review – the history of love by nicole krauss.

February 27, 2018 by Vishy

I discovered Nicole Krauss’ ‘ The History of Love ‘ around ten years back. I was discussing favourite books with one of my friends at that time and she said Krauss’ book was one of her top five alltime favourites. I made a mental note to read it at some point. When our book group decided to read it this month, I was so excited.

There are three story arcs in ‘ The History of Love ‘. The first one is narrated by a man in his eighties, Leo Gursky. He is Jewish and he moved from Poland to America during the Second World War to escape from the Nazis. The girl he loves moved to America before the war started. He hopes to catch up with her, get married to her, and live happily ever after. The Leo Gursky of today, narrates what happened. The second story arc is narrated by a teenage girl, Alma Singer. She lives with her mother and younger brother. Her father is no more. Her mother continues to grieve for her husband while the children grieve in ways that they don’t even realize. One of the things that Alma talks about is a book called ‘The History of Love’ written by a mysterious writer called Zvi Litvinoff. The third story arc is about the writer Zvi Litvinoff and how he came to write this book. How the three arcs come together and get woven into one fabric and how this mysterious book binds them together, forms the rest of the story.

There was a time in the middle and late 2000s, say from around 2002 to around 2010, when there was an explosion of novels of a particular kind. It was hard to classify them – they were not love stories or murder mysteries or historical novels or literary fiction, though they had elements of some of these. Because they were hard to classify, they were called ‘ Contemporary Fiction ‘. They were written in prose which was accessible but also beautiful. In some of these stories, the narrator was a young character, maybe a teenager or sometimes even a pre-teen. But these books were not written for teenagers or pre-teens. They were written for grownup readers. Books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Secret History, The Dante Club, The Piano Tuner, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet, The Shadow of the Wind, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Lovely Bones, The Book Thief. Many of these books were written by first-time writers and they received great acclaim. Some of these writers followed up with a second book which was less acclaimed. Most of these writers faded away after that. Some of the writers continue to publish today, but their works mostly fall below the radar. I don’t know whether this is how things happened. Or whether I am taking a collection of random facts and weaving them into my own fictional narrative. But this is how I look at it. Nicole Krauss was one of those writers. And ‘ The History of Love ‘ was one of those books.

Nicole Krauss’ book has many of the elements of the books that came out during its time. It has a teenage narrator, it has some history woven in, the prose is accessible but beautiful, there is an underlying mystery in the story, and the ending is not simple and it makes us contemplate. There are digressions from the main story in which the narrator talks about life in the deepest parts of the ocean, how to find out whether a forest plant is edible, evolution, and other topics which are quite interesting to read. There are also direct and implied literary references to Kafka, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer which are fascinating to read. I discovered a new book because Alma Singer gushes about it – ‘ The Street of Crocodiles ‘ by Bruno Schulz . I want to read that now.

I loved the two narrators of the story. Their voices are very different and Krauss brings them authentically alive on the page. Leo Gursky has the wisdom and the humour and the kindness and the devil-may-care attitude of a person of his age, while it is hard to resist comparisons between Alma and her more famous literary cousin, Scout , from Harper Lee’s ‘ To Kill a Mockingbird ‘. I loved the fact that there is a book behind the story and it weaves all the plot strands together.

The prose is beautiful and there are many iconic sentences. Like this one :

“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.”

And this one :

“It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.”

There were beautiful passages like this one :

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.”

‘ The History of Love ‘ is about love, family, relationships, history and how these things can come together and become literary art. I loved it. I am happy to report that Nicole Krauss was one of the writers of her time who didn’t fade away – her newest book came out last year, though it looks like it was very much below the radar. I can’t wait to read more books by her.

Have you read Nicole Krauss’ ‘ The History of Love ‘? What do you think about it?

11 Responses

I read this book after being wooed by some of the quotes in the book. I loved it. I enjoyed how we get a different feel while reading about the different characters (the old man, young girl etc). Very well written.

Glad you liked the book too, Resh! Some of the quotes from the book are so beautiful, aren’t they? I agree with you – the voice of the different characters are so different and unique.

This sounds familiar and it seems like one of those guaranteed to be enjoyable reads the type we always need to have a few of on the shelf, especially for reading during winter or when we need something a little more uplifting. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and favourite quotes Vishy, great to read your review and hear about what you’re reading at the moment.

Loved what you said about the book, Claire. Yes, some of the beautiful lines and passages in the book are definitely mood uplifting. I will be definitely going back to those lines if I need some uplifting prose.

I bought this when it came out and it has been on my piles ever since. I was always sure I’d like it and your review tells me I really would. You seem to be back in full force, Vishy. The reviews are chasing each other. I wish I had my blogging mojo back as well. 🙂

Hope you get to read Nicole Krauss’ book and like it, Caroline. It is beautiful. Will look forward to hearing your thoughts. Happy reading! I wanted to be a better blogger this year and it seems to working so far. Thank you for your kind words. Your comments that the reviews are chasing each other made me smile 🙂 Hope you get back your blogging mojo back soon.

Oh yay, so glad you Loved it too!!😊 I really enjoyed the narrators, like you said and loved how maybe the old man sounded Younger and the girl more old and wise. And everything was so quotable about this one!💕👌

Lovely review Vishy. Like you I’ve been aware of this book for a long time but unlike you I still haven’t read it! Nonetheless it stays on my list to get to one day soon. I love the quotes you featured.

Glad you liked the review, Lindsay. So nice to know that you have this book on your list. Hope you get to read it soon. Glad you liked the quotes. Such beautiful lines, aren’t they?

I loved your experience of the boo k;

it seems so appropriate. I agree that the novels you mentioned are unique in the way their authors wrote about life.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts 😊 Thanks for stopping by 😊

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The History of Love: A Novel Hardcover – May 17, 2005

Purchase options and add-ons.

ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE

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.

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Winner of the Borders Original Voices Award Finalist for the Orange Prize #1 Booksense Pick Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner of France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger Award

Print length 264 pages
Language English
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date May 17, 2005
Dimensions 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10 141934224X
ISBN-13 978-1419342240
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

The poetry of her prose, along with an uncanny ability to embody two completely original characters, is what makes Krauss an expert at her craft. But in the end, it's the absolute belief in the uninteruption of love that makes this novel a pleasure, and a wonder to behold. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly

From bookmarks magazine.

From Booklist

From the back cover, about the author, from the washington post.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393060349
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (May 17, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 141934224X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1419342240
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.24 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
#279 in Jewish Literature & Fiction
#2,040 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
#9,874 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Nicole krauss.

Nicole Krauss is the author of the mesmerizing new novel, Forest Dark – hailed as “lucid and exhilarating” by The New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The History of Love. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007 and named to the New Yorker’s Twenty Under Forty list in 2010. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Customers find the writing style beautifully written, memorable, and complex. They also find the characters compelling, complex, and always trying to make sense of their lives. Customers describe the emotional tone as bittersweet, funny, and engaging. They mention the book has great promise and is good fodder for stimulating conversations. Opinions are mixed on the plot, with some finding it enjoyable and haunting, while others say it's too complicated and fragmented.

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Customers find the writing style beautifully written, thoughtful, and complex. They also appreciate the achingly original, raw, and unforgettable characters. Readers describe the book as a wonderful book about the power of words.

"...are a delight - all vivid and memorable for their humanity, their eccentricity , and their inner strength. The author brings them to life on the page...." Read more

"...where we ended up, I would have given it 5 stars because it is so beautifully written , but the residual confusion detracted from my rating." Read more

"...I loved the writing in this book and the characters...." Read more

"I, too, think this book has much beautiful prose in it and the skeleton of a wonderfully evocative story if only it were written by another author...." Read more

Customers find the characters compelling, complex, and distinctly drawn as very real humans. They also appreciate the author's remarkable talent for narrative and philosophical range.

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"...looking for an evocative literary read full of memorable, multi-dimensional characters , this may be the book for you...." Read more

"...Krauss's depiction of Leo is indeed incredible , splendidly redolent of so many eastern European immigrant old men of my childhood...." Read more

"...The book certainly deserves 4 stars for its vibrant characters and wonderful humor by which painful life experiences are explored with a touch of wit..." Read more

Customers find the emotional tone of the book bittersweet, humorous, and heartfelt. They also say the balancing act builds a rich, heartfelted sense throughout the novel.

"...I found myself bursting into laughter more often than not at the wonderful humor . Some of the dialogue is especially witty...." Read more

"...Yes, there are comic moments and quirky aspects that are humorous , but it feels tragi-comic more than funny. But, overall, it feels true...." Read more

"...I thought this was hilarious and sad at the same time like when Leo as an old man will knock over displays in stores and mess up Starbucks orders..." Read more

"...and beauty, a "momentous and satisfying final chapter of great emotional depth ". Huh? Satisfying?..." Read more

Customers find the book engaging, magical, passionate, and human. They also appreciate the thoughtful interactions and quirky characters.

"...declare so moved and amazed them with its brilliance and beauty, a " momentous and satisfying final chapter of great emotional depth". Huh?..." Read more

"...Not only do they fit together, but each event is intricately motivated ; each flows naturally into the next, and careful use of language knits them..." Read more

"THE HISTORY OF LOVE is both entertaining and just a bit pretentious.The characters in the novel are quite compelling...." Read more

"...The characters are vivid and deep and you become totally involved . I would have given it five stars except for two things...." Read more

Customers find the character strength in the book indomitable, with an indomiable spirit of courage and grace. They also describe the book as life-affirming, heartfelt, and hopeful.

"...and memorable for their humanity, their eccentricity, and their inner strength . The author brings them to life on the page...." Read more

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"...I thought the writing was decent - it flowed nicely and had great promise , but by about 2/3 of the book I started to feel that it was probably not..." Read more

"...Krauss is a beautiful story of the power of love and an indomitable will to live , in spite of unbearable loss...." Read more

Customers find the discussion in the book stimulating, passionate, and human. They also say it's perfect for book clubs, intellectually and emotionally, and a pleasure to share. Readers also say the author did a magnificent job relaying the message, and there are several different voices to keep them interested.

"...It is a pleasure, intellectually and emotionally, and a pleasure to share with friends . So...." Read more

"...That is pretty powerful, and Krauss did a magnificent job of relaying that message ." Read more

"...It's a powerful message ." Read more

"Our book club read this together. Great conversation , and thoughtful interactions." Read more

Customers are mixed about the plot. Some find the intertwined stories enjoyable, mesmerizing, and complex. They also say the characters are memorable for their humanity, eccentricity, and connections. However, some readers feel the plot is too complicated, confusing, and fragmented.

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"...The connections are fragile and not fully explained . Even at the end, I found myself wondering what had happened and where we ended up...." Read more

"...--part of the fun--but I believe Krauss constructed an intricately crafted web of connections that link all the characters in the book through..." Read more

"...The plot was confusing to follow at times but the writing made up for it and this is a book that I will read again and again and probably get..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it moving and funny, while others say it jumps around too much.

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"...The story was not fluid and jumped around a lot ...." Read more

"...The story is captivating -- touching, moving , sad, hopeful, and hard to let go. It's not linear though, so practical types move on...." Read more

"... Confusing the way it jumped around . The story itself turned out to be a good one, just could have been told better." Read more

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Current Issue

Past, Present, Future

Questlove’s personal history of hip-hop

Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop

An elegiac retelling of rap’s origins, Hip-Hop Is History also ends with a sense of hope.

Buffy (Darren Robinson) of the Fat Boys in Chicago, 1985.

This Juneteenth featured, among other festivities, a historic moment for hip-hop: a diss concert, so to speak, aimed directly at one of the biggest names in the genre: Drake. That evening at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, another of the biggest names in rap, Kendrick Lamar, brought together 25 West Coast legends from hip-hop’s past, present, and future to perform together. They did a lot of different songs, but the most well-aimed jab was the repeated performance of Lamar’s “Not Like Us”—a shot fired directly at Drake’s public persona and private life that also hit No. 1 on Billboard . It was a weird moment, because it meant that rap beef—rap beef!—had become international news. To me, that feels telling: Hip-hop has evolved. We’ve gone from the local rivalries of rap’s early days to stadiums, international tours, and rap becoming something like the lingua franca of popular music.

Books in review

Hip-hop is history.

Making this argument, however, requires some consensus about where and how it all began. That, it turns out, is a hard question to answer—maybe even harder than Drake trying to figure out the best response to Lamar’s recent barrage of diss tracks. Many hold the official beginning of hip-hop to be August 11, 1973, at a party in the Bronx where Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, spun two copies of a James Brown recordin such a way that the beats were foregrounded and extended. It made a space for dancers to really get down; it also provided room for emcees to rap over it. That said, Ahmir Thompson—better known as Questlove, the six-time Grammy-winning cofounder of the Roots (who also won an Oscar for his documentary about the legendary Harlem Cultural Festival)—has some quibbles: “Herc was drawing on existing Jamaican music traditions, like toasting, where Jamaican vocalists performed over American R&B records,” he writes in Hip-Hop Is History , a new memoir of the genre. “But for me, it also draws on traditions in Black music that stretch back at least a decade earlier. I think of Ray Charles taking the Southern Tones’ ‘It Must Be Jesus,’ outfitting it with secular lyrics, and creating ‘I Got a Woman.’” He goes on to mention artists like Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, and the Watts Prophets; the “progressive spirituality” of Curtis Mayfield; Melvin Van Peebles’s filmmaking; Maya Angelou, Dick Gregory, and more. It’s a characteristically long and varied list. “None of this should minimize Herc’s party,” Questlove adds. “It’s just that hip-hop didn’t come from one place, and it didn’t go to one place. It went everywhere.”

Hip-Hop Is History is Questlove’s attempt to chronicle where hip-hop went—maybe not every place, but surely most of them. It’s a very personal, very loquacious history—written with Ben Greenman, a longtime collaborator on Questlove’s other books—that is as much a catalog of Questlove’s taste in music as it is a record of what actually happened in the genre since 1973 (or, given his quibbles, even before).

Of course, because of the subject matter and the author, the personal elements are as much a feature of the book as anything else. We get an insider’s take on hip-hop’s history, a story of its past, present, and future from one of its leading, lifelong practitioners. But for Questlove, it’s not just about his own journey. As he explains, there’s a number of “invisible words” in the title, starting with “Hip-Hop Is (Revisionist) History.” “What I mean by that,” he writes, “is the entire life span of this young, vibrant genre has been marked by assessments and reassessments, declarations that proved to be untrue in a year’s time, or ten, and opinions that are cracked open like eggs to reveal newer opinions inside them.” To make his point clearer, we then get a set of other possible titles: “Hip-Hop Is (Recurring) History,” “Hip-Hop Is (Two) Histories,” and “Hip-Hop Is (My) History,” each with its own refractive meaning.

To tell these multiple stories, Hip-Hop Is History is divided into 10 chronological sections, along with an introduction, an epilogue, and an extensive concluding playlist, “Hip-Hop Songs I Actually Listen To.” Each section is titled after a famous lyric from the era and is introduced by a page or two of setup before Questlove dives into his meticulously detailed memories. To wit: We get snatches of his childhood in Philadelphia, doing dishes with his sister and hearing the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” for the first time: “The effect was instant. It was as if we had been plugged into an intergalactic power source.”

Obviously, this is one of the pivotal moments in Questlove’s career as a musician, the thing that got him started down the path to everything that came later. (The second thing: meeting Tariq Trotter, better known as the rapper Black Thought, with whom he cofounded the Roots.) But the real insight comes later, when Questlove compares the Sugarhill Gang to Michael Jackson. “Michael had abilities that were not easily transferred to children sitting at home by the radio,” he writes. And then, later, he notes how the group “had a brilliance all its own, but all it required to replicate was a good memory and a night of dedication. I had those. That led to something more complicated and intimate, which was a true shift in identity. I discovered that rap and hip-hop made me popular, but also that I responded to it. It was like a battery snapped into a toy.”

After that, we get more capsule histories of hip-hop interspersed with reminiscences from Questlove’s middle school and high school years. The book continues more or less in this vein, with the personal set alongside the historical, and as we get closer to the present, we see Questlove draw closer to hip-hop’s firmament. When this approach works, it really works—such as when he tells the story of the Roots meeting Kanye West the second time, in a dressing room in Los Angeles. There wasn’t enough room for West to really perform, so he improvised by rapping very close to Trotter very quietly—as in getting in his face and whispering. “Kanye was close-talking Tariq with his lyrics, like some kind of hip-hop Seinfeld episode,” Questlove writes. “Riq would listen for a while and then take a few steps, and Kanye would take a few steps, too, a shadow talking, a comer rapping.” It’s hilarious and compelling to imagine.

What’s less gripping, at least at times, is the history being told—not because it isn’t interesting, but because it’s occasionally too detailed. Questlove has impressive powers of recall; the problem is that the precision of his memories can sometimes slow the momentum of the stories.

The Nation Weekly

Sometimes those details help his larger story, as when Questlove recounts the legendary 1995 Source Awards, which he attended with the Roots. There’s a lovely bit of scene-setting—”(Is that redundant, history in the past? Maybe not. There is plenty of history in the future. We just aren’t there yet)”—and then Questlove describes the growing feud between East Coast and West Coast rap by describing Nas’s ill-fitting Tommy Hilfiger shirt. “But awards were different, right? They rewarded pure creative achievement, right? Wrong,” he states. “Over and over again that night, nominees were read, nominees held their breaths, winners were read, and everyone except winners exhaled in disappointment.”

But at other times, the narrative arc gets lost in all of the details. Take a representative paragraph:

The “Buddy” single contained more than one important song, but it also contained more than one important “Buddy.” The album version, five minutes long, was subdued and sedate. The extended single, subtitled “Native Tongue Decision,” not only had the JBs and Tip, but also Monie Love and Queen Latifah. And it sounded different. The album version sampled the Commodores, the Five Stairsteps, Bo Diddley, and the Invitations. The longer version kept some of this, like the Stairsteps, but it was mainly powered by a sample from “Heartbeat,” a hit by the disco/boogie singer Taana Gardner. “Heartbeat” had been used before, by the Treacherous Three back in 1981, but it would really blow up in the late eighties and 1990s (you may know it from Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper”).

Interesting? Yes. Necessary? Debatable, though I’m charmed by Questlove’s fondness for parentheticals.

Having begun with the underground innovators of the late ’70s and ’80s, then moving through America’s fears about the genre in the 1990s before ending triumphantly in the 2020s, Hip-Hop Is History concludes in the present, relatively speaking. There’s no mention of the Juneteenth diss concert, because, well, a book about history has to end sometime. But there’s a melancholic feeling in the last three chapters, which begin with a lament about rappers and pills—“Drugs were portrayed as recreational but only as a feint: within minutes it was clear they were something more profound, a way of blocking out certain aspects of the society”—and end with what feels like a eulogy for those gone too soon. Questlove recounts how many people were missing from the industry by 2022: “Deaths from illness, particularly those that could be mitigated or prevented, are sad. They remind us of the fragility of existence. But they do not remind us of the cruelty of humans toward themselves and others.”

It’s a litany of unimaginable sadness, one that almost dares us to ask what might have been. And it broke Questlove. “It got to the point where I stopped writing obituaries on social media. I couldn’t keep up.” But “then it got to the point where I started to feel more philosophical about the entire process, less because of hip-hop proper and more because of the inevitable, unstoppable life cycle.” The fifth stage of grief, of course, is acceptance.

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While the last sections of Hip-Hop Is History are elegiac and often philosophical, Questlove does end on a note of not-quite-hope. His epilogue is a fictional introduction to the 100th anniversary of hip-hop in 2073. In it, he imagines himself with new synthetic organs, living in a flying house, explaining the old days. It’s a curious ending, not least because the hope that Questlove expresses is that hip-hop won’t exist in the future. “I don’t want to write the introduction for Hip-Hop Is Still, Still History in 2123. I’m not sure that I want there to be any more hip-hop in 2123,” he writes. “I want it to truly be history. Breakbeats are evidence of how we were once broken, and I want nothing more than to bring about a healing.” Hip-hop, he means here, is our pain turned into art: You either express it or it eventually destroys you. Questlove, of course, understands this intimately, and that knowledge thrums beneath the surface of here.

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Bijan Stephen is a music critic for The Nation . He lives in New York and his other work has appeared in The New Yorker , The New Republic , Esquire , and elsewhere.

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An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

Reviewed by jessica t. mathews, by doris kearns goodwin.

The title Kearns Goodwin chose accurately suggests this is an intimate memoir but does not do justice to the book’s rich blend of history and biography. Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was married to the presidential speechwriter and policymaker Richard Goodwin for over 40 years. Goodwin began his career working for U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Although he went on to write the greatest of President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society speeches and help formulate key domestic policies, his relationship with Johnson was forever undermined by the president’s conviction that Goodwin was a Kennedy man at heart. Goodwin’s desire to leave the White House to begin an independent phase of his career touched off a characteristically Johnsonian blend of exalted praise and vicious reprisal. By contrast, Johnson was responsible for launching Kearns Goodwin’s career when he made her a key aide during her tenure as a young White House fellow at a time when he had begun to mellow. The tension between the couple’s different experiences animated their marriage and was the basis of a jointly undertaken project to mine Goodwin’s massive archive from the 1960s to see whether it was possible to reach some joint understanding of the time. Goodwin’s death cut short the shared project, which Kearns Goodwin continued on her own. The result is a wonderful read and a revelation of much that is new about a period in American history that was both transcendently hopeful and tragic.

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By dmitri alperovitch with garrett m. graff, brought forth on this continent: abraham lincoln and american immigration, by harold holzer, ascent to power: how truman emerged from roosevelt’s shadow and remade the world, by david l. roll, stay informed., thank you for signing up. stay tuned for the latest from foreign affairs ..

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Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee

Reviewed by Holly Mortlock

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Sebastian Smee is renowned for his vibrant portrayal of art history. Unlike some authors, who deliver the past with the enthusiasm of a bored Year 8 teacher, Smee brings events to life vividly, with remarkable energy and insight.

His latest book, Paris in Ruins , tells the story of the Impressionist movement as it wriggled into existence during the incredible political volatility, and then urban gentrification, of 19th-century Paris.

Smee skilfully uncovers the era’s complexities through the intricacies of its human relationships. Focusing on figures such as Édouard Manet and, refreshingly, the often-overlooked Berthe Morisot, as their lives unfold in the lead-up to the devastating Siege of Paris in 1870 and the subsequent Republican rebellion.

I found this book both devastating and entertaining to read. Occasionally, it is reminiscent of an Alexandre Dumas novel, with a cast of people who find themselves in awkward and ridiculous situations – crashing double-decker hot-air balloons into villages or getting into duels, for example. Matters of the heart are also navigated, in situations fraught with social rules. The book illuminates the interactions and rivalries between Morisot, Édouard Manet, his brother Eugène, and the moody Edgar Degas, using sections of commentary from diaries and letters that left me expelling air they were so barbed. Morisot was the origin of many of these moments, relaying events from Paris in letters to her sister.

I felt a deep empathy for the women of this period, particularly those in the lower classes, who were largely trapped in Paris before the ‘Terrible Year’ set in. Reflecting on how I would have fared if I were in their place was unsettling and thought-provoking. There are also moments within this work that seem to mirror some of the events we have seen more recently in our own time, and this raucous, layered and engrossing read left me reminded of the inseparable bond between politics and art.

Paris in Ruins

Sebastian Smee

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Book review: ‘Signals’ affirms Kris Farmen’s status as one of Alaska’s finest historical novelists

“Seasons of Want and Plenty Book II: Signals”

By Kris Farmen; Blazo House, 2023; 210 pages; $16.99.

Far too little has been written about Russia Alaska, a colony founded for economic purposes that was never truly inhabited by Russians other than employees of the Russian American Company, itself established to supply the fur trade. And even what has been written tends to center on activities along the Panhandle, where the company’s power was based. Its operations along the western coast of Alaska are largely overlooked by historians and novelists alike. This is the mostly untraveled void of literary opportunity that Fairbanks author Kris Farmen has stepped into with his trilogy of simultaneously published books, “Seasons of Want and Plenty.”

The books follow the travails of Ivan Lukin, based on a historical figure who, like many born in the colony and employed by the company in its latter days, was of mixed blood. In his case, one-quarter Russian, one-quarter Koniag, and one-half Déné Athabscan. Lukin’s grandfather was Russian, and his father had risen to esteem and status within the company. Lukin lives forever in his father’s shadow, never seen as having reached his potential.

The first book in the trilogy, “Fireweed,” was set in 1862. It followed Lukin on a journey up the Yukon River to locate a rumored trading settlement of the Hudson’s Bay Company believed to have been established at today’s Fort Yukon and operating illegally on Russian-owned soil.

The second volume, “Signals,” opens three years later with the arrival of an American merchant ship in St. Michael, laden with supplies. The men on the vessel are tasked with erecting a telegraph line to what was then Fort Youcon as part of a larger project to connect the United States with Europe via Canada, then onward through Alaska, beneath the Bering Sea, and across Russia. The project was ultimately abandoned in 1867, but at this novel’s time, it was an ongoing enterprise.

As the Americans reach the shore, their presence furthers rumors flying across the colony of an impending sale of Alaska to the United States. These final years of Russian America, and the transfer of its governance into American hands, provide the time frame that Farmen explores as his stories unfold.

I say stories because, while “Signals” furthers the themes and subplots of “Fireweed,” it’s also a standalone novel in itself. The wisdom of breaking the saga into three volumes published more or less simultaneously rather than as a single book becomes readily apparent. And one can in fact begin the series by reading this one, although I wouldn’t advise it.

Lukin is given the job of assisting the Americans, who many suspect of being spies as well as workmen, in reaching Fort Youcon. The first step is accompanying several of them to Nulato, following the River Kwifpak (the name the Russians used for what is now known as the Yukon). The trip takes place over ice and snow as winter settles in. Here Farmen does what he does so well, conveying a sense of the harsh land and its merciless climate in stark yet poetic words.

“The icy wind screamed down the river’s course like a monster from ancient myth,” he writes, evoking Cormac McCarthy, a subtle but key influence on his writing. Some pages later he adds, “The moon was still up, casting its light over the courtyard. It was nearly full and the monster’s face carved into it could be seen clearly. Both Ursa Major and the dogs on their tethers were silent in the flinty cold and there was no hint of dawn.”

“Flinty cold.” What an image.

The monster’s face on the moon follows Lukin wherever he goes, and is part of the magical realism driving these novels, which otherwise draw from Farmen’s deep research into the era’s history. As a child, Lukin had been gifted the ability to understand and fluently converse in all the languages of the peoples of Russian Alaska. When suddenly he can speak English fluently, he knows the colony’s imminent fate. He’s protected by Tathyaldin, a Tananah shaman whose name must not be spoken. And he’s haunted by dreams of his father’s early life that seem to bring ill omens of Lukin’s future.

Most crucial is Zia, a shapeshifting soul eater Lukin first encountered at age thirteen while a student in the boarding school at New Archangel (Sitka). Emerging from the sea as a nude girl of about age fourteen and remaining ageless ever since, she travels by water and continues to pursue him, materializing at crucial moments and attempting to drag him into the rivers or ocean with her. She is the source of his dreams, and her ultimate purpose and destiny, entwined with Lukin’s, awaits the third volume to be (presumably) revealed.

On the historical side, Farmen lodges these novels in their era, using Russian and Native terms of the time to denote places and people. Unalaklit rather than Unalkleet. Koltog for Kaltag. Nuklukayet is today’s village of Tanana. Among the people dwelling in the region, the Tlingit are called the Kolosh, the Dene Athabscans are referred to as the Dinneh, and the Tanana people the Tananah. Creole, the word for those of mixed Russian and Native heritage, is used on Lukin himself. All of this furthers Farmen’s goal of recreating time and place in vivid terms.

As the story progresses, Lukin’s personal life careens through its straining pieces. His daughter Anastasia by his first and now deceased wife is recently returned from boarding school and becomes entangled with a young American from the ship. Lukin, cuckolded by his second wife, enters into a love triangle of his own, lending his days further complications.

Farmen deftly carries all of these threads across the landscape between St. Michael and Nulato and beyond while navigating through the politics and power struggles of Russian America on its final legs. He continues to excel as a historical novelist, perhaps Alaska’s best. With language and imagination, he recreates a lost age and then infuses it with magic and mystery. “Signals” continues his already impressive winning streak.

(“Meridian,” the third and final volume of “Seasons of Want and Plenty,” will be the subject of a forthcoming review this fall.)

[ Book review: A gifted storyteller shares her early Yukon River life ]

[ Drawing on her Athabascan heritage, Jan Harper-Haines delves into family history and a murder mystery ]

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer, and editor of the Alaska literary collection “Writing on the Edge.” He can be reached at [email protected].

Embattled Nation: Canada's Wartime Election of 1917

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Rating:	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Title:	Embattled Nation: Canada's Wartime Election of 1917 (English Edition)
Author:	Patrice Dutil & David MacKenzie
Audience:	University
Difficulty:	Medium
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Published:	2017
Pages:	362

In the midst of one of the most turbulent periods in Canada’s history, Patrice Dutil & David Mackenzie delve into what they deem as the most significant and tumultuous elections since confederation. Their work, 'Embattled Nation: Canada’s Wartime Election of 1917 ', meticulously explores the 1917 election between Conservative leader Sir Robert Borden and the Liberal opposition of Sir Wilfred Laurier.

The book underscores how Prime Minister Robert Borden's initial pledge against conscription was upended by the mounting casualties and increased British demands for troops.[1] This policy shift sparked significant resistance, particularly from French Canadians, who vehemently opposed conscription, while English Canadians broadly endorsed it. The profound schism between English and French Canadians is depicted as the central narrative, underscoring how cultural and linguistic tensions inflamed the national crisis.[2] The 1917 election, a pivotal moment in Canadian history, morphed into a conscription referendum, with English Canadians mainly in favour and French Canadians vehemently against. The authors situate this election amidst riots and protests from both sides, a battle for and against conscription, and in the face of existing French English divisions, which have now deepened as the election and its issue swiftly became a matter of identity.[3] Dutil and Mackenzie also draw attention to the widening chasms within Canada’s established political parties, contending that the issue of conscription nearly tore apart the liberal and conservative caucuses as ministers split and departed over the issue.[4]

Despite the Union government's victory, the conscription policy faced practical challenges and exacerbated linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic divisions, highlighting the fragility of national unity. In the end, the author's insightful analysis leads them to argue that never had there been a test of Canadian unity and confederation as in the 1917 election.

Patrice Dutil and David MacKenzie provide a detailed and well-researched account of Canada's political and social landscape during World War I, focusing on the 1917 election and the issue of conscription. The book is commendable for its extensive use of evidence and meticulous documentation of events, offering readers a thorough understanding of the period's complexities. Their use of diary entries and personal accounts from Borden, Laurier, and those around them gives a sense of authenticity to the events being described. The book also provides a thorough context for the period with extensive maps, statistics, election information, and statistics of the war effort that effectively paint the scene of 1917. Finally, the book provides extensive context around existing linguistic and cultural divides between French and English Canada, which provides a valuable context for the ensuing discussion.

However, despite its solid evidentiary foundation, the book falls short in convincingly arguing that the 1917 election was the most contentious in Canadian history and that it nearly saw the collapse of the confederation. The authors emphasize the deep divisions between English and French Canadians and describe how conscription became a central and divisive issue. Yet, they also acknowledge that there was majority support for the Union government and conscription, which complicates their argument about the election nearly breaking up the country.[5]

The portrayal of the election as a moment that almost led to the dissolution of Canada seems somewhat overstated. While the authors provide ample evidence of French-Canadian opposition and the resulting social unrest, they do not fully reconcile this with the broader national support for the Union government and the conscription policy. This oversight weakens their central thesis about the election's unparalleled contentiousness. While it is true that perhaps this election did deepen the divide between French and English Canada, it did not do so to the extent to which one could say that the country was near collapse, at least not with the evidence provided in the book, in the way it is provided.

While it is true, by the provided evidence, that much of French Canada vehemently opposed conscription, they did not oppose the Country as a whole, with a referendum to succeed, having only marginal support and never actually making it to a vote on the Quebec parliamentary floor.[6] There were indeed protests and riots during the time; still, they were fed by feelings of alienation and betrayal by the Borden government, not Confederation, with Laurie receiving much support from French Canada.[7] While it is accurate to say that both the Liberal and Conservative governments were almost torn apart, in the end, both parties survived relatively unscathed under the united leadership of Laurier and Borden, respectively.

Overall, "Embattled Nation" is a valuable resource for understanding the political dynamics of wartime Canada and the cultural rift between English and French Canadians. It provides a usually unexplored context to the First World War in Canada, giving insight into one of the prevailing conflicts in Canadian history that reaches today, the French-English divide. To understand the impacts of the First World War on Canada, one must first understand how the war impacted the conditions of the home front, something this book does very well from a socio-political and cultural framework. However, its assertion that the 1917 election was the most divisive in Canadian history could have been more convincingly articulated, given the authors' admissions of widespread support for the Union government and conscription from a majority part of the Country. Perhaps refining the thesis to focus more on the French-English connection rather than the election itself with an increased focus on the protests and riots would make for an overall more convincing argument. At the same time, it is accurate to say that the 1917 election was pushed by issues surrounding conscription; the election itself was fairly unanimous thanks to the political maneuvering by the Borden government. With more focus on those aspects and a closer examination of the reactions to said maneuverings, the argument that this period in Canadian history was the most tumultuous becomes more evident and more convincing.

The authors meticulously provide a detailed historical context and present a balanced view. While the book could delve deeper into the motivations and experiences of French Canadians and the social impact of riots and protests, 'Embattled Nation' effectively captures the political maneuverings and profound consequences of the conscription crisis, offering a compelling narrative of a nation grappling with its identity and unity during a tumultuous period. The book provides an excellent insight into the relevant social and cultural aspects of the time and provides an informative look into tumultuous Canadian history. Perhaps its only fault, then, is that with the evidence the authors provide and how they alky it out, their argument that the country nearly collapsed and was at the brink of tearing itself up seems to be overstated.

[1] Patrice A. Dutil and David Clark MacKenzie, Embattled Nation: Canada’s Wartime Election of 1917 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2017). Pages 38-39, 67-69, 71.

[2] Ibid. Pages 71-73, 82-83, 119.

[3] Ibid. Pages 102, 180-185.

[4] Ibid. Pages 74-81, 88-91.

[5] Ibid. Pages 216, 249.

[6] Ibid. Pages 256-257.

[7] Ibid. Pages 74-81.

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Book review: A touch of psycho, science and PI work: The Outlier delivers a summer read that gets the job done

Elisabeth Eaves uses thriller tropes serviceably; but doesn’t aim to reinvent the wheel.

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The outlier, book review: a touch of psycho, science and pi work: the outlier delivers a summer read that gets the job done back to video.

Elisabeth Eaves | Random House Canada

$24.95 | 325pp

Primed for Neflixification, The Outlier opens with stylish, mildly racy scene. Having slipped on stilettos and unplugged her roadster, Dr. Cate Winter has driven to a chic hotel bar in Seattle. She needs to take the edge off: sales negotiations are tense. Not yet 35, the neurobiologist is also the head of a drug company that’s brought Nebusol, a veritable cure for Alzheimer’s, to market, and will soon be a brilliant, sexy billionaire with ample time and funds to tackle new projects.

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If all goes well, of course.

In the meantime, she’s on the prowl for a “prospect,” an available man who’ll take her mind off the imminent sale and also satiate her sexually. She surveils the room. In the first of the novel’s many twists, the chosen man’s amorous prowess comes with a caveat — he’s not the perfect stranger he claims to be. The situation is handled in due course by a quick call to Jia Koh, Winter’s business partner and Alphaneuro’s COO. For Winter, though, a far weightier problem looms, one Koh cannot resolve because she’s unaware it exists.

Winter has A Troubled History. And not just a stack of unpaid parking tickets or an arrest at a political rally while she was in college.

She’s a psychopath, a psychopathic CEO in fact. Born with a differently formed brain, she’s part of the one per cent of humans who excel in certain ways while lacking boundaries, empathy, or a standard-issue moral compass. If news gets out about that, the sale of Alphaneuro will have a snowball’s chance and Winter’s rosy future will collapse into prison-grey infamy.

Thankfully, the risk is slight. After a desultory childhood that reached a nadir with a house fire, violence and a death, Winter was rescued by a man she affectionally calls Dr. M. He runs Cleckley Institute in rural Washington State. There, he developed a curriculum of techniques for his young wards that would enable them to achieve virtual normalcy. As there’s no altering “wayward brains,” the best possible outcome is to channel the aberrant impulses of junior psychopaths and train the kids so they do not wind up with the fate of other psychopaths: “a life of crime” and jail sentences.

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Young Winter was such a success that Dr. M mentored her. And shared his medical history files. Perusing them, Winter later discovers that while many of her institute mates turned out marginalized, incarcerated, or dead, there’s another outlier: Number 98. He’s a Seattle CEO who disappeared after the failure of his nuclear fusion startup.

Winter is intrigued. She’d welcome a friend who shares her life experiences and “shallow affect.”

After a moment, she’s hired a discreet PI, who traces Number 98 — named Hunter — to a resort he owns on the Baja Peninsula, where Winter’s ex happens to be. He’s investigating the red snapper and other fishes that are dying inexplicably there.

Could Hunter have anything to do with these deaths, or what about the governor Hunter has in his pocket, or those desperate eco-activists? And what’s the deal with that journalist and that private island Hunter owns, with its Dr. No vibes?

Though Winter comes to know that Hunter is an accomplished, if feral, lover, she senses something is amiss. He’s somewhere between Lyutsifer Safin in No Time to Die and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Conflicted, Winter wonders what kind of psychopath she’ll choose to be.

Twists and escalating calamities (and fish corpses) can’t disguise the inherent silliness of The Outlier. The debut novel of Vancouver born-and-raised current Seattle resident Elisabeth Eaves (Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents) uses thriller tropes serviceably; but Eaves doesn’t aim to reinvent the wheel.

As a summer read, The Outlier is much like Dr. Winter’s hope for a prospect: something that doesn’t ask for much but gets the job done.

Salt Spring Island resident Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of five novels, including My Two-Faced Luck and The Age of Cities.

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How do Emily Henry’s YA books measure up to her mega-popular adult romances?

Colorful Emily Henry novels have become a staple on bookstore shelves everywhere, but that wasn’t always the case for the author. In fact, many people may not realize that Henry used to write young adult novels—she published four of them before switching to adult fiction .

Henry’s first book was a YA novel called The Love That Split the World , and it was published when she was still working as a proofreader back in 2016. She toiled away at the YA genre for four more years before her first adult fiction novel, Beach Read , gave readers a fun romantic escape right when we needed it most: during the height of COVID-19 in 2020. Since then, she’s published four more adult novels, and all five of her novels have been optioned for on-screen adaptations. To date, she’s sold more than 2.4 million books worldwide!

Now that we know how Henry got her start, how do her earlier YA books stack up against her more recent work? We ranked all nine of her books to find out.

9. A Million Junes (2018)

cover art for A Million Junes features a girl in gold against a blue background

In A Million Junes , Henry’s second published work, the O’Donnell and the Angert families are like a modern-day version of the Capulet and Montagues from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . The families have been foes for decades, but no one really remembers why until teenagers June O’Donnell and Saul Angert accidentally fall in love. Suddenly, the family feud is rekindled, and June and Saul find themselves utterly star-crossed.

Why does A Million Junes come in last? Well, Henry’s writing is as concise and entertaining as ever, yet this story feels derivative, to say the least. Still, it’s a solid entry into the YA genre that touches on important and weighty feelings that directly affect her teen readers’ lives: love, family, and loss.

8. When the Sky Fell on Splendor (2019)

People huddle in the tractor beam of a UFO

When The Sky Fell on Splendor is such a fun book, we hate to rank it so low on the list! But this YA novel is so different from Henry’s other work, it just feels like an outlier from the start.

In this book, we meet a teenager named Franny whose small town of Splendor, Ohio suffers a tragedy that results in her brother languishing in a coma for years. Franny finds solace in a group of adventure hunters called The Ordinary, who spend their time searching for supernatural phenomenon that never actually materializes. Until, one day, it does.

7. Funny Story (2024)

cartoon image of a woman and a man sitting together at a bar

Henry’s latest adult fiction novel, Funny Story , was just okay for me. The writing is excellent as always, but I never felt a connection with the characters, and the whole plot felt a bit forced.

The story is about a children’s librarian named Daphne whose fiance Peter leaves her for his childhood best friend, Petra. Somehow, Daphne winds up sharing an apartment with Petra’s own ex, a scruffy grump called Miles. The two hatch a drunken plan to get even with their exes, but naturally, things don’t go exactly as they’d hoped. Frankly, I would have enjoyed this novel more if there was more of a revenge angle; instead, it’s a fairly vanilla love story, but still tasty nonetheless.

6. Hello Girls (2019, with Brittany Cavallaro)

illustration of two teen girls wearing sunglasses

Henry teamed up with Brittany Cavallaro, the bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes novels, to write this feminist tale of best friends who flee their abusive homes and go on the run. Hello Girls is essentially a teen version of Thelma & Louise , which is why it doesn’t rank higher on this list, but it’s got the wit and snappy dialogue you’d expect from a novel from these two authors.

5. The Love That Split the World (2016)

Cover art of a figure falling though a crevice

Henry’s debut novel was not a huge hit, but it was a respectable entry into the YA romance category and it showed the author’s range. The Love That Split The World dabbles in science fiction, exploring the concepts of love and time travel in equal measures. The story follows Natalie, a recent high school graduate who starts having odd “glitch in the Matrix” moments she can’t explain. When a ghostly grandmother figure emerges with a message about “saving him,” she’s confused … until she meets Beau.

The Love That Split The World is not as polished as Henry’s later works, but it’s a unique story with enjoyable characters, and we love a good sci fi angle.

4. People We Meet on Vacation (2021)

orange background with two people in bathing suits lounging on chairs

Thanks to the success of 2020’s Beach Read , Henry’s second book aimed at adults was an instant bestseller. People We Meet on Vacation has all of the elements we enjoy most about Henry’s work: quirky characters with an “opposites attract” dynamic, snappy dialogue, and a fun location that makes the reader feel like we’re on vacation with the characters. The trouble here is with the plot, which is rather formulaic and unbelievable at times.

Poppy and Alex seemingly have nothing in common, yet they’re best friends trying to reconnect after a falling out. They talk it out while on vacation … and talk … and talk … and talk some more. If you love witty repartee, this is the Henry novel for you.

3. Happy Place (2023)

pink background with cartoon figures jumping into the water and swimming

The 2023 novel Happy Place is a classic beach read. It takes place in Maine, Vacationland itself, and features Henry’s usual cast of chatty and hilarious characters. The story centers on the driven Harriet and the laidback Wyn, a couple that got together in college and stayed together, right up until now. Harriet and Wyn haven’t told their friends that they broke up, so they decide to fake being in love for their annual group vacation to Maine. Naturally, their real feelings start bubbling to the surface quickly, and it doesn’t take long before they don’t have to fake anything anymore.

2. Beach Read (2020)

yellow background with man and a woman lying on beach towels

Beach Read is Henry’s very first adult fiction novel, and it’s the one that put her on the map! Readers were enthralled by the instantly at-odds characters Augustus and January, two authors who write vastly different kinds of books. Both are struggling with writer’s block and are renting side-by-side beach cottages, so they hatch a plot to get both of them writing again. Augustus attempts to write a romance novel, and January tries her hand at crime fiction. They take field trips as research, and somewhere along the line, they fall in love. Obviously!

1. Book Lovers (2022)

cartoon image of a man and woman reading a book with their backs to each other, but they're holding hands

My favorite Emily Henry novel is Book Lovers , hands down! This book is truly heartwarming, and the characters feel so real it’s as if we made friends while reading. The story follows Nora Stephens, a feisty literary agent whose sister Libby convinces her to take a vacation in a small town. Nora goes along, envisioning a Hallmark movie-style scenario in which she’s swept off her feet by a burly local. Instead, she meets a cynical book editor named Charlie, who comes from the same city Nora lives in.

Book Lovers manages to deal with some heavy topics (for a Henry novel), yet it does so with a light touch. The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny at times, and it’s a book we didn’t want to end. Every writer has to start somewhere, and Emily Henry’s talents were evident from her first novel! I enjoyed all of her books, but when it comes to a favorite, it has to be Book Lovers .

Left: Author Emily Henry posing with her novel Happy Place. Right: Emily Henry posing with her novel Book Lovers

IMAGES

Book Review: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Book Review: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Book Review # 113: The History of Love
REVIEW: The History of Love
Book Club: Our next read is…”The History of Love”
The History of Love

COMMENTS

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
3.92. 136,931 ratings12,420 reviews. Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer.
The History of Love
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. A most unusual and original piece of fiction—and not to be missed. The histories of several unresolved, inchoate and remembered loves. The first of the stories here is that of New York City octogenarian Leo Gursky, a Polish war refugee who came to America seeking Alma, the girl he had loved, who had emigrated before him.
'The History of Love': Under the Influence
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected. More to the point, The History of Love is a significant novel, genuinely one of the year's best. Old Leo (a new entry in the ...
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
PBR Book Review: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is a beautiful mystery about love and loss. Centered upon a book called "The History of Love," the novel follows the two narrators and their relationship with the book. The first is Leo Gusksy, an elderly Holocaust survivor living a sad lonely life in NYC.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: Summary and reviews
With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories. 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 ...
The History of Love
The History of Love: A Novel is the 2005 novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss.The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction. [1]An excerpt from the novel was published in The New Yorker in 2004 under the title The Last Words on Earth. [2]
Review of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Devising plots didn't seem like my strength, which didn't bother me too much, since the books I love generally don't depend on them. For a long time all I had was Leo's voice. Then Alma's. I had these little bits of The History of Love which I didn't know yet were going to become a book within a book--they were just vignettes.'.
The History of Love
The History of Love is such a unique and beautiful book, one I read with great pleasure quite literally from the first sentence to the last. It is a mystery, a prose poem, a meditation, a single answer to many questions. It is the kind of book one hopes to find but rarely does: a work that captivates, challenges, and consoles, all at once.
The History of Love
THE HISTORY OF LOVE, Nicole Krauss's second novel, is a complex story that doesn't lend itself well to being summed up in a nice, neat plot synopsis. For one thing, the book travels back and forth in time, narrated by several characters, sometimes in the form of letters, diaries, and even a novel-within-a-novel (also, not coincidentally, called ...
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
The History of Love swirls with people traduced, abandoned, misunderstood or simply forgotten. But here's the magic. The novel is also a tender tribute to human valiance and stoicism.
The History of Love
THE HISTORY OF LOVE, Nicole Krauss's second novel, is a complex story that doesn't lend itself well to being summed up in a nice, neat plot synopsis. For one thing, the book travels back and forth in time, narrated by several characters, sometimes in the form of letters, diaries, and even a novel-within-a-novel (also, not coincidentally, called ...
Amazon.com: The History of Love: 9780393328622: Krauss, Nicole: Books
Nicole Krauss. Nicole Krauss is the author of the mesmerizing new novel, Forest Dark - hailed as "lucid and exhilarating" by The New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The History of Love. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room, was a ...
The History of Love
This obscure "History of Love" contains all the world's deepest secrets - or so it seems to 15-year-old Alma Singer. When Alma's parents named her, they took to heart a line from the moldering ...
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: Book Review
Elderly Leo Gursky lost his great love when he was young and he has spent the rest of his life living with what-might-have-beens and watching her and her family from afar. Not in any kind of icky way but in a caring way. Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is named after all the women in a book entitled The History of Love.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The History of Love. by Nicole Krauss. Publication Date: May 17, 2006. Genres: Fiction. Paperback: 252 pages. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-10: 0393328627. ISBN-13: 9780393328622. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy.
The History of Love
Book Review The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Genre - Romance, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction. "He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard." At a delicate age of fourteen Alma Singer tries to play a matchmaker for her mother. She worries about her mother's loneliness in the ...
Book Review # 113: The History of Love
Book Specs. Author: Nicole Krauss Publisher: Viking Publishing Date: 2005 Number of Pages: 252 pages Genre: Historical, Postmodernism, Novel Synopsis. Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer; tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks.
Book Review
And 'The History of Love' was one of those books. Nicole Krauss' book has many of the elements of the books that came out during its time. It has a teenage narrator, it has some history woven in, the prose is accessible but beautiful, there is an underlying mystery in the story, and the ending is not simple and it makes us contemplate.
The History of Love: A Novel
Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is a hauntingly beautiful novel about two characters whose lives are woven together in such complex ways that even after the last page is turned, the reader is left to wonder what really happened. In the hands of a less gifted writer, unraveling this tangled web could easily give way to complete chaos. However, under Krauss's watchful eye, these twists and ...
The History of Love|Paperback
Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of America's most important novelists." She is the author of Man Walks Into a Room, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year; The History of Love, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature; Great House, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award ...
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The History of Love: A Novel Hardcover – May 17, 2005

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