Finishing The History of Love

I finished "The History of Love" this morning at about 12:30am. Since I didn't have anything going on yesterday, I devoted all my evening to finishing it.

SPOILERS

It was a roller coaster of a book. It went from three seemingly mismatched tales to this one solid, amazing story. To be honest, the book started with this old man, Leo Gursky, and I didn't like him very much. He seemed down right crazy, and one of those old people that I never want to become. The fact that his old childhood friend from Poland lived in the apartment above him was charming though.

The girl Alma, daughter to the woman whose husband died, wasn't as deep as I would have hoped. She seemed like someone who you started to truly know by the end of the book, which is probably why I didn't want the book to end. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed her, but for my own curiosity I want to know what ended up happening between her and Misha, her immigrant friend whom she figured out she was falling in love with, again, at the END of the book. Yarg!

And the author of the book "The History of Love" within the book "The History of Love" (how complicated is that!?), Litvinoff. What a warped man he turned out to be. I could never print a good friend's work under my name, even if I did have their eulogy at the very end.

The parallels in this book were great. Essentially, Krauss' "The History of Love" was Litvinoff/Gursky's "The History of Love", complete with Leo's eulogy at the very end. It was spectacular, unexpected, and I just know that I want to read it again to catch all the things that I missed.

The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

While buying copies of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" for my book club, the shop keeper, Heidi, recommended this book to me as well, which, as it turns out, is by Jonathan Safran Foer's wife.

Synopsis: This book is similar in style to Foer's work. Foer uses multiple story lines to describe a common theme, and so does Krauss. She takes three very different lives that seem to be on complete opposite ends of the grid, and weave them together in surprising and interesting ways that you would have never anticipated. One story involves an old man bent on his own death, a young woman who lost her husband and whose daughter constantly tries to set her up, and an author of an inspirational book that motivates many characters entitled, "The History of Love". It's also a book within a book.

This sounds intense and unlikely to make sense, but so far, I'm more than half way through and it is downright fantastic. I just hit a point where I gasped and said, "WHAT!? Wow! I did NOT see that coming."