t would be unfair to liken Nicole Krausss second novel, The History of Love, to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast. The second, and more significant, is that Krauss is one of fictions dutiful daughters. She has written almost entirely under the influence of powerful literary fathers, an assemblage of canonical figures including (to list only those explicitly cited in The History of Love), Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. That the relatively young and untried Foer has joined them in her pantheon represents only a slight deviation from form. Krausss first novel, Man Walks Into a Room (2002), carefully followed the recipe for making a postmodern novel of ideas after the fashion of Don DeLillo. Its the story of a man with an improbable case of amnesia who visits a neurology clinic specializing in transplanting memories from one brain to another. The clinic is out in the Mojave Desert, and nuclear testing inevitably comes into the proceedings as the characters drift around in a state of cathode-ray-tinted detachment, meditating on the metaphysical implications of space travel and People magazine. Its an intelligent book but, for all its self-conscious hypermodernity, very cautious and therefore unexciting. The History of Love has more vigor, partly because this time the mode, á la Foer, is sentimental Jewish magic realism. The novel is about three people. The first, Leo Gursky, is an aged Manhattan locksmith who, during his youth in Poland, wrote a novel, The History of Love, inspired by his love for a girl from his village; he lost both the girl and the manuscript. The second, Alma Singer, is a 14-year-old Brooklynite named after every female character in that novel. The third, Zvi Litvinoff, connects them. Unbeknownst to Leo, Litvinoff published The History of Love, translated from its original Yiddish into Spanish, under his own name in Chile during the 1950s or early 1960s. Sometime later, traveling through South America, Almas father discovered and fell in love with the book. As is so often the case, what we are shown of the book-within-a-book in The History of Love is underwhelming. (If the book-within-a-book were really so terrific, the author would have written that book instead.) The glimpses offered consist of chapters describing an imaginary and overly adorable chronicle of human affection, beginning with The Age of Silence, during which people communicated only by gesture, and continuing through The Age of Glass, when everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile, and The Age of String, when it wasnt uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. When a beloved woman appears in these vignettes, she is always named Alma, after the girl Leo loved. The formula, in short, is equal parts Italo Calvino and corn syrup. There is, however, another book-within-a-book that turns up in The History of Love, one so incongruous and so abruptly abandoned you cant help but notice it. At one point, the lonely, kvetching Leo -- a sort of denatured Philip Roth character, who complains about his bowels and makes minor scenes in shoe stores to ensure he wont die on a day when I went unseen -- receives by mysterious provenance a printout of an English translation of The History of Love. He is thunderstruck by a possibility: COULD I BE FAMOUS WITHOUT KNOWING IT? This question prompts a visit to the library, where Leo asks the librarian to search the catalog for every book by Leopold Gursky. She comes up with a single title, a childrens book called The Incredible, Fantastic Adventures of Frankie, Toothless Girl Wonder. Disconsolate, Leo tells us, I couldnt do anything to turn the nothing the librarian had found into something. He sits hunched over the book, then leaves without opening it. And thats the end of that.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 11:34:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015