Sold Out
Book Categories |
Title: The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display)
WonderClub
Item Number: 9780393329643
Number: 12
Product Description: Full Name: The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display); Short Name:The History of Love: A Novel
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780393329643
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780393329643
Rating: 4.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/96/43/9780393329643.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9290 total ratings) |
Dwohntany Wilder
reviewed The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display) on January 24, 2016“He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.â€
The Simplest Questions Are the Hardest to Answer
1. What is love?
2. Who am I?
3. Is there a word for everything?
4. What sort of book is this?
5. What is a palaeontologist?
5. What is a Palaeontologist?
“If he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a palaeontologist.â€
This beautiful book is a similar cornucopia of fragments. The narratives have different textures, colours, size, shape, weight, mood, and style. They connect in often unexpected ways: pieces may split, run parallel, then diverge, or be reunited. And yet. The result is wondrous, strange, and deceptively simple.
4. What Sort of Book is This?
“A kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination.â€
It is ostensibly about love, but is at least as much about surviving loss and postponing death. It’s also about identity. And yet. The book itself has no single identity: love stories, investigative journal, self-help book, memoir, philosophical musings, historical fiction, bildungsroman, quest, survival manual, teenage diary, spiritual metaphor...
It is like Newton's Third Law interpreted as poetic allegory. Every force is counterbalanced by an equal and opposite force: writing and reading, truth and lies, taking and giving, youth and age, future and past, hope and despair, hiding and being seen, and ultimately, life and death.
3. Is There a Word for Everything?
“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?†a reader says to a writer. Long ago, “sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned.†Trying to describe the emotion of being moved “must have been like trying to catch something invisibleâ€. Years later, the writer calls a book “Words for Everythingâ€.
Many characters read, and all the main characters write, whether for publication or not, one “because an undescribed world was too lonelyâ€. And yet. The bigger issue is the things that cannot be said, are not said, or are lost in transit or translation (whether by accident or design). Silence. Gaps. Absence. Loss.
“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.â€
There are three main narrators, but secondary sources (paratexts?), often with unknown or misattributed authorship, are key to the plot: letters, photos, obituaries, drawings, and books that may be “not unlike the truthâ€. Things are further muddied by mentions of real-life people (JL Borges, for instance), people who are real in Krauss’ book and are central to works of fiction within it, and a couple of characters who may not be real, even in that fictional realm. Where is truth?
2. Who Am I?
I thought I knew who I was. I don’t need to investigate or assert the truth of my identity in any legalistic sense, but like Alma S, I’m named after someone. Unlike her, I chose to claim my name for myself, rather than learn more about the one whose name I bear.
And yet. Of all the labels I can ascribe myself, many are in relation to others: mother, daughter, wife, friend, even English, British, European. I am not myself alone - even when it might feel like it. I can claim membership of numerous collective identities. Even as a reader, I am connected to other readers, as well as authors and their creations.
Silence. Gaps. Absence. Loss
“I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes… I lost the only woman I wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way… I didn’t also lose my mind?â€
The characters on these pages have variously lost lovers, a parent, a child, their homeland, their health, their mission, and acknowledgement of their authorship, and some are concerned with extinctions at a species-wide level. And yet. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, they continue "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
Survival may happen by accident, but it usually continues by will. While some focus on practical skills, most concentrate on ways to enhance and prolong life, and thus delay death - whether their own or someone else’s.
And yet. Krauss offers no easy answers, or even any definite ones. Just as there are many permutations to define who we are, so there are many, sometimes contradictory, ways to endure loss:
Notice and be noticed - or hide to survive?
Keep things the same - or change everything?
Acknowledge and remember - or forget in order to live?
Tell people you love them - or ask them to “Love me less�
Look forward - or look back?
Develop rituals and superstitions - or apply cold logic?
“Sacrifice the world†to “to hold on to a certain feelingâ€
Fill the gaps with facts or fiction - or…
Learn to appreciate the beauty found in absence: the silence between notes of music, the pauses of punctuation:
"Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of the common sparrow."
Image of leaf/bird by Ukranian architect Oleg Shuplyak.
This isn’t a trite message about seeing the silver lining, but about finding a different way to see, to experience, to live, while acknowledging and appreciating who or what is missing.
“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.â€
1. What is Love?
I am fortunate that the tragedies in my life have been minor compared with those experienced by the characters here. The cultural context and the smattering of Yiddish words are largely unfamiliar to me, too. And yet. Krauss spoke to me from these pages: to me, of me, and of others.
“I tried to make sense of things. It could be my epitaph.â€
Sometimes, even if I've really enjoyed a book, I find myself thinking "And yet."
Not with this. Not even a little bit.
I guess that means it's perfect - even if I can’t adequately explain why, nor answer this final question.
I am a reader. Krauss is a writer. I am in awe.
Quotes
• “Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.â€
• “The boy became a man who became invisible. In this way he escaped death.â€
• “At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same.â€
• “The truth is a thing I invented so I could live.â€
• “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.â€
• “The words of our childhood [Yiddish]... became strangers to us… Life demanded a new language.â€
• “The traffic lights bled into the puddles.â€
• “Life is a beauty… and a joy forever.†Later, “Life is beautiful… and a joke forever.â€
• “In the most important moment of his life he had chosen the wrong sentence.â€
• “What is not known about Zvi Litvitoff is endless... These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.â€
• “Holding hands… is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.â€
• “Some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were sent to the paper compactor, where they were shredded to a pulp along with other unread or unwanted book, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine’s spinning blades.â€
• A writer imagines books “As a flock of… homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after barely reading a page, how many never opened at all.â€
• “Only now my son was gone did I realise how much I’d been living for him.â€
• “I’ve always arrived too late for my life.â€
• “I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I’d gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago.â€
• “The door between the lives we could have led and the lives we had led had shut.â€
• “The grammar of my life:... wherever there appears a plural, correct for the singular.â€
• Not everyone stays in love:
JM married young “before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.â€
Another says, “It’s hard to imagine any kind of anything - happiness or otherwise - without her. I’ve lived with Frances so long.â€
• “She seemed to pull light and gravity to the place where she stood.â€
• “Perhaps this is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.â€
• “At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions… Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.â€
• “To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape.â€
• “After my Uncle Julian left, my mother became more withdrawn, or maybe a better word would be obscure, as in faint, unclear, distant.â€
• “In another room, my mother slept curled next to the warmth of a pile of books.â€
• “FOR MY GRANDPARENTS who taught me the opposite of disappearing and FOR JONATHAN, my life.“
• “Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.â€
Further Notes
I have jotted down lists about the story, characters, and themes, showing the many and complex connections, HERE , but it is not a review (this one is), and it’s full of spoilers.
Reread
Read in January 2016 and again in July 2016. This review was updated slightly, and my further notes/appendix one significantly.
The reread was a bit like watching The Sixth Sense for the second or subsequent time: at least as good, but utterly different. The multi-threaded plot is so cleverly woven, and once you know the pattern, you spot all the little threads early on. In particular, on first reading, I didn't pay much attention to the irritating and self-important little brother, so his actual importance came as something of a shock. Knowing the outcome meant I was more interested in and sympathetic to him, and even more appreciative of the book as a whole.
Image sources
A heart, like the one used to represent Leo Gursky:
Leaf/bird:
Billy Mcconnaughey
reviewed The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display) on February 28, 2012I need to cut the crap with my preconceptions. Although I almost unfailingly launch into a new novel with great enthusiasm like a kid on Christmas morning, anxious to discover what hidden treasure awaits, for some reason I held out little hope for Mrs. Foer’s book about a book about love. Maybe it’s because books about books about love aren’t usually my thing? Maybe it’s because I read her husband’s bestseller last year and was less than impressed? Maybe it’s because I had heard somewhere that they wrote their books together (oh, how adorable!), bouncing ideas off one another and giving each other high fives, so naturally I assumed that if Mr. Foer’s book was gimmicky (which it is), then The History of Love would surely be a major eye-roller as well, right?
Wrong.
Whatever the reason, I was clearly out of line, and for that I owe Nicole a huge apology. In this book she weaves three intersecting storylines all under a cloud of intriguing ambiguity, so even though it is understood that the stories are related, it isn’t exactly clear how until about two-thirds of the way through. And as the stories of Leopold Gursky, Alma Singer, and Zvi Litvinoff are told to us, they leave an imprint on us even before we learn for sure who they are.
The History of Love is a gorgeous novel with gorgeous characters who do what characters do best: they love and they lose, they struggle and they fail, and if lucky they learn how to pick up the pieces and survive. For them, survival is not a destination but a journey. There’s no magic cure and there’s no end-all. But taken one day at a time, it is possible to live a life worth living. Krauss reminds us that all we really want is to remain visible—to be known, to be loved, and to be remembered by those who knew and loved us.
I won a copy of this book through World Book Night, a program begun in the UK last year to spread the love of reading. That program has now arrived in the US, and even though I technically shouldn’t have qualified for receiving a copy of this—WBN books are supposed to have been given only to “light†readers in the hopes that they become “moderate†readers—I will make sure that it will have been worth their while by spreading my love for this book about a book about love.
Login|Complaints|Blog|Games|Digital Media|Souls|Obituary|Contact Us|FAQ
CAN'T FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR? CLICK HERE!!! X
You must be logged in to add to WishlistX
This item is in your CollectionThe History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display)
X
This Item is in Your InventoryThe History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display)
X
You must be logged in to review the productsX
X
Add The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display), , The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display) to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
X
Add The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display), , The History of Love: A Novel (12 Copy Display) to your collection on WonderClub |