Will you ever forget the first time a book broke your heart?
For me, it was “The Pigman,” the story of two kids who shatter the trust of a lonely old man. I cried all night. I was heartbroken — confronted with an adult truth that the only way to love is to risk loss, and the only way to avoid loss is to never love.
But that’s another story.
Here, close to two decades later, meet my heart — broken again, thanks to Nicole Krauss’s second novel, “The History of Love,” and her unforgettable character Leopold Gursky.
“The History of Love” is the epic title of the unpublished manuscript that a young, passion-struck Gursky wrote before the war. Now aged, he believes that his first manuscript (the second, and last, he stores in a box in his oven) vanished with everything else stolen from him in the war. This includes Alma, Gursky’s muse and only love.
But the manuscript survived, traveling the diaspora and landing in unimaginable places — the deep drawers of a Polish plagiarist, the backpack of a traveling Israeli romantic, the mailbox of an eccentric English translator.
And not only did the manuscript survive, it touched people. It changed people.
We meet Gursky at the end of his life when his greatest fear is that he will die unnoticed. And he goes to great lengths to mark the world with his presence.
When the Chinese delivery guy brings his food, Gursky makes a big to-do, dropping change everywhere. He signs up to be a nude model and endures painful positions no octogenarian should ever have to hold, all in an effort to force himself into people’s memories — to be seen — so that the day he dies, some stranger might say: Sure, I know that dude. I saw his sagging rear end in my art class last night.
Fabulously talented, Krauss has summoned a character whose loneliness is so real that I could taste it, a flavor that is both sweet and sour — but not bitter. What saves Gursky from the trappings of a pathetic, cranky Jewish archetype is his internal world — rich, spirited, weird and anything but miserable.
Here’s Gursky, alone in his apartment with a bottle of vodka the night before a funeral:
“I took a drink, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, repeating the gesture that was made a hundred times by my father and his father and his father’s father, eyes half closed until the sharpness of alcohol replaced the sharpness of grief. And then, when the bottle was gone, I danced. Slowly at first. But getting faster. I stomped my feet and kicked my legs, joints cracking. I pounded my feet and crouched and kicked in the dance my father danced, and his father, tears sliding down my face as I laughed and sang, danced and danced, until my feet were raw and there was blood under my toenail, I danced the only way I knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until I fell, so that I could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found me prostrate on the floor, so close to death I could spit into it and whisper: L’chaim.”
As much as Gursky delights, he’s not the only one. While Krauss’s plot is intriguing and her writing is inventive and playful, what really makes the novel sparkle is that real Jews — quirky, troubled, curious — live between the covers. There’s Bird, a prepubescent outcast who thinks he might be the Messiah. And there’s Bruno, Gursky’s warm, simpleton best friend who wears women’s eyeglasses and leaves him notes like, “Ware are you?”
Krauss sums up Gursky: “He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.” Shameless with her agenda, the writer seems to be saying that at the end of our lives what matters is not what we’ve lost, but how we’ve known love, in a person and, perhaps, in a book, too.
“The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss (252 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., $23.95).