The History of Love pt. 2

The posting on this novel has been far-between and the single reason is owing to the insanity of my professional life. Starting a business is like having a newborn. All the same, I find that I make time for The History of Love in dedicated and tiny pockets. Reading this book is not unlike buying a bag of "fun-size" Mars bars for the express purpose of controlling your diet only to find (not surprisingly) that you have blown through the entire bag in a single sitting. Who were you fooling? The chapters in this book are mini Mars bars, people. You said you would eat just one and before you know it you've read eighty pages.

My experience of this book can be summed up (I loathe summations for as often as I make them)- my experience can be summed up thus: Krauss wrote the early chapters with such strong and certain characters that I was taken. Mystified. Enchanted. Engaged. As her clever constructs flowed into the second quarter of the book I grew weary of the certainty. I am a writer who likes a good deal of absolutes but I am a reader who prefers the gray areas of humanity. The characters in The History of Love are written to be quite clear. Next, moving into the second half of the novel, something magical occurred. Somehow the entanglement of stories began to reveal themselves. Intertwining. Characters began to bump into each other. Began to inform each others (previously assumed) individual tales. Very clever Ms. Nicole Krauss. Very clever indeed. My appreciation of this novel was re-awakened. I was a renewed reader and up until page no. 205 (where I am presently) I was eating the intelligent words like candy. Fun-size candy.

For your approval I submit a smattering of my favorite entries:

For God's sake, he thought. Where is your head? What in the world could you offer a girl like that, don't be a fool, you've let yourself fall apart, the pieces have gotten lost, and now there's nothing left to give, you can't hide it forever, sooner or later she'll figure out the truth: you're a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you're empty. pg.158

I got out my map and memorized the details of the journey. I used to fantasize about disasters, floods, earthquakes, the world thrown into chaos so that I'd have a reason to go to him and sweep him up under my coat. When I'd given up the hope of extenuating circumstances I started to dream about our being thrown together by chance. I calculated all the ways our lives might casually intersect- finding myself sitting beside him on a train, or in the waiting room of the doctor's office. But in the end, I knew that it was up to me. pg. 163

And if, when he tried a second time to replace her name with another, for the second time his hand froze, perhaps it was because he knew that to remove her name would be like erasing all the punctuation, and the vowels, and every adjective and noun. Because without Alma, there would have been no book.

Be not afraid. Find this book at Half-Price. Or pay full price. Find this book and pick it up and hate yourself for absolutely loving the clever zingers, truths, and half-truths told in this novel.