The History of Love
Nicole Krauss builds this novel around a manuscript that may or may not have survived the war, and the people who read it decades later. Leo Gursky, a Polish Jewish locksmith in South America, wrote the book for a girl he lost in 1939; Alma Singer, a Brooklyn teenager named after its heroine, stumbles toward it while repairing her mother's grief. Krauss lets their stories orbit each other without forcing coincidence, and the result is a book about love as a kind of private archive, passed hand to hand until meaning accrues.The Norton edition carries the same plain authority as the prose. Krauss is skeptical of sentiment but not above it. The novel works best when it catalogs small, durable losses: a drowned village, a dead bird, a letter that arrives too late. It is for readers who believe love survives less as feeling than as an object passed hand to hand until someone knows what to call it.
