‘History of Love’ looks at power of literature

According to the imaginary, long-lost book nestled within the pages of Nicole Krauss’ wonderful and haunting second novel, there once existed an Age of Glass, in which “everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass.”

The era is notable, the fictitious young author continues, for “introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion.”

Krauss’ real, marvelous book is about loss and coming to terms with it, as well as the ways in which the insistent tug of the past shapes our lives.

She explored the latter in her debut novel, “Man Walks Into a Room,” in which a brain tumor erases an English professor’s memory. Once again, in the deftly layered “The History of Love,” her characters are starved for the past.

With deceptively nimble humor and unsentimental tenderness, Krauss uses the book-within-a-book structure to explore the power of literature in our lives as well as to intertwine the narratives of two beguiling New Yorkers.

One is the aforementioned author, the aged Leo Gursky, who, despite his trenchant wit, is afraid of turning invisible – a fate of those who grow old alone.

“I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive,” he muses. “If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven.”

Once his life was different.

In his youth in Poland, Leo had loved a girl named Alma. He loved her so much – even after she left for the United States one step ahead of the Nazi onslaught – that he wrote a book for her about the history of love.

The book, Leo thinks, is lost – just like his family, his beloved, the son he has never met. But its fragile pages are as resilient as he is. He doesn’t know it, but somebody has read his book.

As it happens, right there in New York City lives teenage Alma Singer, whose parents, entranced by a version of “The History of Love,” named her after Leo’s Alma. Prompted by a letter to her translator mother that mentions the book, she is about to begin a quest to find her namesake.

Alma, too, understands the pervasive reach of sorrow. Her father died when she was 7 and, like Leo, she is consumed by memories.

Krauss’ novel stands firmly on its merits as passionate, funny, warm and completely satisfying. Its mysteries are intricate and absorbing and its characters unforgettable – even Alma’s odd, friendless little brother Bird, who firmly believes he is the Messiah: “Every morning he wakes early to daven outside, facing Jerusalem.”

Not quite a thriller, not exactly a coming-of-age story nor a Holocaust memoir, “The History of Love” manages to be all three and also something more: a breathtaking meditation on loss and love.