The History of Love - Nicole Krauss

BookClub: 19 de desembre a les 19 h a la Biblioteca Mestra Maria Antònia.

Excerpt of a review in The Guardian:

Is It must take some courage for a writer to create a fictional character who is also a writer, and to try to convey the power of this imagined author's oeuvre. Isn't it hard enough to create one convincing authorial voice? Sure, Nabokov in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Saul Bellow in Humboldt's Gift did it with complete conviction, but since they are inimitable geniuses their example might act as a warning rather than encouragement. The fact that Nicole Krauss, a young novelist with only one book behind her, has attempted to carry off this feat is, if nothing else, testament to her bravery.

We first meet Leo Gursky when he believes he is nearing the end of his life, living alone in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. He is an elderly Jew who came to America from Poland after the second world war, having survived the Holocaust in hiding, "mostly in trees, but also cracks, cellars, holes". Gursky is terrified of dying on a day when nobody has noticed him, which drives him to mildly attention-seeking behaviour - dropping his change in a shop, say. Although he seems to be a man without much of a life, we soon learn that he was once rich in art and love. He loved a woman, Alma, in Poland, but because he took too long to get to America she married somebody else. He also wrote a great novel in Poland, The History of Love, but entrusted it to a friend who later told him that it was lost. So the Holocaust allowed him to survive, but without the core of himself, and it seems that all we see is the husk of the man, withered and waiting for death.

Read the rest of this review here.

Other books by the same author that you can find in English at the Public Libraries of Catalonia (link):

• Great House

A movie based on this book is due to be released during 2012.
To celebrate the winter holidays, we will watch a seasonal film (Christmas film).