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. A most unusual and original
piece of fiction-and not to be missed. (Kirkus Reviews)
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs
neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in
the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book.
. . . Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old
Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an
adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic
skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws
these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and
beauty" (Newsday).
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