The History of Love

The History of Love, novel by American writer Nicole Krauss that was published in 2005 and was later adapted as a 2016 film.

This sad and achingly beautiful book is a skillfully crafted exploration of loss and its aftermath. With continually changing narrative voices, it weaves at least three stories seamlessly together with moments of surprising convergence, their unifying point being the book manuscript, “The History of Love,” written by Polish émigré Leo Gursky, a paean to the only woman he ever loves, Alma.

The story begins with Leo. Now an old man, Leo lives a solitary life in his New York City apartment, continually revisiting the past and creating for himself a half-fantasy world in which he can survive his sorrows for a little longer. He moved to New York from Poland after suviving the Nazi invasion of his homeland and after the girl he loves had moved to the U.S., pregnant with his child. He learns that she believed that he had died and had married. Their son, Isaac, grows up to be a well-known writer. Leo sends him a manuscript he has written, entitled “Words for Everything,” which is later published as Isaac’s final work.

The second narrator is a teenage girl named Alma, after a recurring character in a book written in Spanish and called “The History of Love” that her father once gave to her mother. Her father died when she was a small child, and her mother, a translator, continues to mourn. One day Alma’s mother receives a commission from Jacob Marcus to translate “The History of Love” into English. The third thread of the story is about Zvi Litvinoff, who immigrated to Chile from Poland with the Yiddish manuscript of “The History of Love,” which he translated to Spanish before publishing it, with his name as author. It was a copy of this book that Alma’s father gave to her mother.

Alma wants to find Jacob Marcus as a possible love interest for her mother. Looking for clues, she notices that the only character in “The History of Love” who does not have a Spanish surname is Alma Mereminsky, and she theorizes that she might bear the name of a living person. It is then revealed that Zvi was a friend of Leo’s in Poland and that Leo had given Zvi the manuscript for “The History of Love” for safekeeping. Alma learns that the Alma of the book married but has died, leaving her son, Isaac. She also discovers that Jacob Marcus is the name of the protagonist of Isaac’s books but that Isaac has also died. Eventually, Alma meets Leo and learns that he is the author of “The History of Love.”

The History of Love, Krauss’s second novel, won critical praise for its tender approach to its characters combined with its intellectual themes in a postmodern story that yields surprising humor and genuine suspense.