Sunday, March 2, 2014

13. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss



The History of Love is different, even if my writing skills fail to showcase how. This is not a sad story or a happy one, it just is. A book with the most interesting and extreme characters, this is not a love story, at least not entirely, and yet it is about love. It is about a love story with an unsatisfactory end, another with a satisfactory one, a story about lives wasted, betrayal and guilt, about never getting over a lost one, a story about a father's love for his son, friendship, a young girl in past, a young one in present and a very eccentric child.

It is extremely well written, even as it challenges the reader to keep up with the multiple threads interwoven across lives, across time. While covering the lives of so many characters in detail, the author does an even more amazing job of consciously ignoring some of them, leaving just enough to the imagination of the reader, and all the reader has are the realities and perceptions of those characters, as seen through the eyes of the ones whose lives were covered. There is not a sense of closure to  most of the characters and even that is not unwelcome.

(****)

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