The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Being Moved

If you like your schmaltz delivered hot, thick and with plenty of gravy, Krauss is your writer. I mean no disparagement by saying that nobody does Holocaust survivor-tragedy better than she. The old man in the empty Manhattan apartment whose pregnant Polish sweetheart had left him years ago for America, and whose closest contact with his son is at the son's wake is tragedy with punch. As is the teenager who desperately wants to reconstruct memories of her dead father through a relationship with yet another survivor-figure who is obsessed with the work of an obscure South American poet (he a betrayer-survivor). Identities blur and flow into one another until the reveal becomes complete. The way human beings deal with chance, particularly the randomness of death, and the role of the long-term tragedy of chance itself become pitiable. With her remarkable skill, Krauss entraps (I have no better word) the reader into her emotional universe. Her oeuvre is emotion and as one of her characters says, "The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible." She does a good line in making much that is invisible if not entirely clear then at least something to be considered seriously, savoured like a good kosher meal.

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