21. the HISTORY of LOVE

Nicole Krauss 2005

A complex, inventive and intelligent story told in alternating format, each distinct from the other. It is about Leopold Gursky, an old man coming to terms with his death, while maintaining his everlasting longing for his old love. It is the story of Alma, a young inquisitive girl who set out looking for somebody that her Mother can love after her father died. And it is the story of a book called the History of Love.

"When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT. I'm surprised I haven't been buried alive."

"She read and read. When she finished she looked up. For a long time she didn't speak. Then she said maybe I shouldn't make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything."

"And if a man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it."

"I want to say somewhere:I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back."

"WORDS FOR EVERYTHING."

"MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER. She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists on water and air."

"The idea of evolution is so beutiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So,ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived on earth are extinct."

"Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand 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 reading barely a page, how many have never opened it at all."

"The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely."

"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. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past:IwasbeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybod
yismadeofglassI'veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme..."

"MEMORIES PASSED DOWN FROM MY MOTHER...Finding sand in the pockets of her clothes... Rain... My father ... Thousands of pages."

Personal note:The second of five books I picked up from Montreal,Canada; there were so many more to quote but they would give the story away.