He spends his days trying not to be invisible - deliberately spilling coffee when he goes out, for instance, and taking a freelance job as a life model for an art class - all the while dreaming of his lost manuscript and wondering if he might have been able to make it as a writer if it hadn’t got lost in the first place. Intertwined with this narrative is the story of Leo, now an elderly man living a solitary existence in a New York apartment block.

Recently bereaved, the translator’s task is a pleasant distraction from thinking about the early death of her husband, but for her daughter, Alma, it offers a chance to play matchmaker - between her grieving mother and the mysterious benefactor, based in Venice, who is paying for the book to be translated chapter by chapter. Now, more than 50 years later, a single and much-loved copy of the book is in New York, where it is being translated by a woman who named her first child after the lead character in its pages. But, unbeknownst to Leon, it was published in South America under another man’s name at a later date. The manuscript, written by Polish man Leo Gursky about the woman with whom he had fallen in love, was considered lost during the turmoil of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. A literary mysteryĪt the heart of The History of Love is a mystery around a book, also entitled The History of Love. Told from two divergent view points - a young girl mourning the loss of her father and an elderly Jewish man mourning the loss of his lover and the son he never got to know - it’s a wise and tender book framed around an original and inventive structure. It is one of those wonderful stories that celebrates survival, love and literature, and cleverly weaves in a literary mystery with a moving story about unrequited love and grief. This is what happened to me when I began Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love earlier this week. Sometimes you pull a book from your shelves not really knowing what to expect and before you know it you’ve read 100 pages and are so absorbed in the story you’ve forgotten all sense of time. Fiction – paperback Penguin 272 pages 2005.

The history of love by nicole krauss