The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

At a KIRBC meeting over a year ago, my friend Emily brought in The History of Love. As is tradition, she read us a passage, and I knew instantly that I would love the book. As it turns out, Emily wasn’t the only one who loved it – History comes with SIX pages of praise at the front, perhaps the most I’ve ever seen. That’s a lot of pressure for a book, but luckily, this one charmed me from the opening paragraph:

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. The place isn’t big. I have to struggle to keep a path clear between bed and toilet, toilet and kitchen table, kitchen table and front door. If I want to get from the toilet to the front door, impossible, I have to go by way of the kitchen table. I like to imagine the bed as home plate, the toilet as first, the kitchen table as second, the front door as third: should the doorbell ring while I am lying in bed, I have to round the toilet and the kitchen table in order to arrive at the door. If it happens to be Bruno, I let him in without a word and then jog back to bed, the roar of the invisible crowd ringing in my ears.

If Richler had written more mellow, amiable old men, you would meet Leo Gursky, a character penned with such humour and compassion that he immediately captured my heart. As you can see from the opening passage, he is a man afraid of being forgotten, who just wants another human being, even a stranger, to look at him on the day that he dies. For this is a story which explores the painful disappearances of loved ones, the places carved out by love and left hollow by absence. Not only the loss of  romantic love, but the loss of parents or children, of friends or a hometown which no longer exists. In this desire for the disappeared, love becomes a sort of nostalgia.

And so Leo tries to fill these absences with words. For if loneliness is to be unseen, perhaps love is to be looked upon. (After his description of his first encounter with Alba-as-prototype, Leo writes “Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”) And as he writes The History of Love (the book within a book), he is forever re-imagining his one great love, Alma. But good writing should not only evoke this love for its creator, but for its readers as well. And with the unwitting help of a  plagiaristic friend, that’s how Leo’s book spreads love, and potentially provides a salve for other losses. For the other main thread in the story is that of a young girl, named Alma after Leo’s heroine for all time. Alba is familiar with the holes left by love: after her father’s death, she watched her mother shut down, and her brother turn to religious eccentricity perhaps in an effort to be seen. She starts out searching for a new husband for her mother who is disappearing in plain sight, but ends up trying to track down the mysterious author of The History of Love.  For although Krauss’ History focuses on absence, it also acknowledges that loss may provide the opportunity for something new:

“And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you flet for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.”

There are too many passages like this one I’d like to quote, but the writing is exquisite, and made better by Krauss’s facility with both humour and despair, her demonstration that humour can be the cane that enables an old man to walk. Like all histories, History is a story without a real beginning and end, with no easy resolution, merely a snapshot in the lives of a few people brought together by words borne of loneliness.

Read Full Post »

JK’s Love Letter to Love Letters

I was talking with my friend Jen a while ago, and she mentioned she had just bought a book of fictional love letters. Before the conversation was over, I’d looked it up on Amazon, and I ordered it soon afterward (sorry independent booksellers). Because let’s face it, I’m a sucker for love letters (even if they’re not for me). Four Letter Word:  Original Love Letters is not only a great idea, but one that came with a lot of literary clout. There was a pretty heavy Canadian contingent – Leonard Cohen, Douglas Coupland, M.G. Vassanji,  Miriam Toews, Joseph Boyden, Graham Roumieu, and even the grand dame herself – Margaret Atwood. The book also has an impressive line up of international authors including Neil Gaiman, Damon Galgut, Jeanette Winterson, Audrey Niefenegger and Ursula K. LeGuin.

The letters cover all kinds of  love besides the obvious falling in – love lost, love spurned, forbidden love, lust, love for friends and love for parents. They also communicate through a wide range of mediums including email, reference letters, and classified ads. They range from heartwarming to heartbreaking, some made me laugh out loud, while others brought me to tears (which really, is incredibly impressive when you’re only working with a few pages). My personal favourite would have to be Jeanette Winterson’s (reading her exquisite letter lead me to Lighthousekeeping, another happy pairing between writer and reader). Her letter is a meditation, inspired by photographs, on a past vacation and a past love, in which love and travel are equated in one of the truest and most effective metaphors for love I’ve ever encountered:

Two Americans are videoing the scene so that they can show it to their friends at home. But there will be nothing to show. Once left behind, there is only Disney Venice, a fake, a pretend , a tourist attraction. Be here, and it’s still possible to find the city, but you can’t take it home with you. Venice is a quantum city, a Schrodinger’s cat of a map, simultaneously dead and alive, true and false, solid and watery, firm and disappeared.
Like us.
Like love.

Other personal favourites included Gaiman’s letter, which shows that even love will not be spared his trademark creepiness, Bigfoot’s letter to Santa thanks to Roumieu, Joseph Boyden’s love through classified ads, and certainly a tip of the hat is due to Tessa Brown, one of those annoyingly talented people who is still an undergraduate.

One of the most interesting parts of reading it was that I often struggled to ascertain the sex of the letter writer, and it was nice to see both sexes equally adrift in turbulent seas of love.

The other book worth mentioning on this day of love is one that I fell in love with last year – Other People’s Love Letters, edited by Bill Sharpiro. A delightfully voyeuristic collection of real love letters ranging from text messages to artwork to letters from 1918, OPLL is an entertaining, varied collection that explores the various facets of romantic love – infatuation, lust, commitment,  and heartbreak, and their uniqueness demonstrates that while love itself may be universal, particular relationships are marvellously individual. They never seem to fall into being trite, repetitive or saccharine, Reproduced in four-colour facsimiles of their original form, this is a fantastic coffee table book, which for many people passing through my home has been love at first sight. Even as times have changed, and a now a love letter can be comments of the blog of a deceased lover or a quick text message, what’s remarkable is that love itself hasn’t changed. The old letters and the new ones present the same emotions in new mediums. Granted, certainly the newer ones are less ceremonious and more overtly sexual (take one of my favourites which simply says “I bought whipped cream”), but love (and heartbreak) endure. Far from a sappy collection, OPLL does not neglect love lost (one letter is a piece of lined paper with “LIAR” written on it 183 times), and consequently it balances the optimism and realism so necessary in putting one’s own history of love in perspective. The back of the book also contains follow-up to many of the letters, expanding on what happened to the lovers or the circumstances that provoked the letter. Some of these are terribly tragic, some heartwarming, all interesting. There’s a website with a few examples some additional letters on it.  On the hunt for more collections of love letters, I came across this blog entry that contains some lovely ones from historical figures past.

And so, Happy Valentines Day, and if, like your humble digital correspondent, you find yourself without a lover, pick up one of these lovely collections to remind yourself that love is all around, or perhaps, that you might just be better off alone.

Read Full Post »

Happy V-day

Though this day often drives me crazy with its over-hyped consumerism and seemingly obligatory pairing, I am still a hopeless romantic at heart.  And since books were really my first love (and to this day, perhaps my greatest), a beautiful passage about love from one of my favourite novels (from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves):

“Why, look,” said Neville, “At the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here in London, in this firelit room, you there, I here, is all. The world ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights stripped and gathered of their flowers and holds no more. Look at the firelight running up and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops heavy. It falls on the toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim – I think it is the firelight and not your face; I think those are the books against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an arm-chair. But when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when you came in this morning. There can be no doubt I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.”

Read Full Post »