The History
of Love
Table of contents
01.
Background
information
03. Themes
02.
Formal
features
04.
The ending &
the title interpretation
01
Background
information
Nicole Krauss
● born August 18, 1974
● grew up in New York
● a British Jewish mother and and
American Jewish father, who grew up
partly in Israel
● novels:
Man Walks into a Room (2002),
The History of Love (2005),
Great House (2010)
Forest Dark (2017)
Inspiration
Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in
Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to
London.
Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary
and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later
emigrated to New York.
Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005
novel, The History of Love, and the book is
dedicated to her grandparents.
Holocaust Literature
“The representation of Holocaust in
this novel may be read as an early
witness to the end of a generation of
Holocaust memoirs and to a future of
Holocaust
literature
where
imagination and history - both
Holocaust and non-Holocaust history
- are interpolated.”
— Lang (2009: 44)
Formal
features
02
History of Love - genre
Magic
realism
Bildungsroman/
coming-of-age
Historical
fiction
POSTMODERN
NOVEL
The stories within the story
● The History of Love:
○ The Age of
Silence
○ The Age of Glass
○ The Age of String
● Laughing & Crying &
Writing & Waiting ->
Words for Everything
● The obituaries
“It must take some courage for a
writer to create a fictional character
who is also a writer, and try to convey
the power of the imagined author’s
oeuvre. Isn’t it hard enough to create
one convincing authorial voice?”
— Walters (2005)
“The glimpses offered consist of
chapters describing an imaginary
and overly adorable chronicle of
human affection. The formula, in
short, is (...) corn syrup.”
— Walters (2005) :c
“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-withina-book were really so terrific, the
author would have written that book
instead.)”
— Miller (2005) :c
Metafiction?
Metafiction is a literary technique in which the author selfconsciously draws attention to the fact that the story is a work of
fiction, often by breaking the illusion of reality or creating a sense of
reflexivity within the narrative.
Possible
elements:
❖ multiple narrators
❖ a story within a story
❖ the obituary
Multiple points of view
However, the novel also offers the additional option of
seeing things from the point of view of a particular
character.
In such cases this character serves as a focalizer or lens;
the story is put across to the reader through the filter of the
focalizer’s thoughts and perceptions.
(Fludernik 2009: 36)
Focalizers: Leo Gursky, Alma Singer, Bird Singer, Zvi Litvinoff, Rosa Litvinoff
Narration
Functions of a narrator:
❖ narrative - presenting the world
❖ commentating/expounding - giving the circumstances
❖ moralist (philosopher) - articulating universally valid proportions
❖ discursive - the communicative situation of narration (directly addressing
the narratee, making metanarrative comments about the process of telling
the story)
(Fludernik 2009: 27)
Narration
What remains a complete mystery, however, is the checkered history of the inset
novel The History of Love. That story is revealed only via a fourth, problematic
voice in the novel, an unidentified “omniscient narrator” (Salvidar, no pag.) who is
capable of filling in the voids that are left in the manuscript’s history.
(...) The fourth narrator’s avatar is a book, which suggests that this voice belongs
to the main author within this book: Leopold, genuine author of the inset History of
Love. Indeed, this fourth, unidentified voice is Leopold’s as well; Leopold who is
imagining, on the basis of Rosa’s introduction, what could possibly have happened
to the manuscript that he wrote so many year ago in Yiddish and that he now
discovers on his desk in an English translation.
(Codde 2011: 48-49)
Asia last
evening
Anita reading her
messages
The humor
“I looked up at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year old should know
the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn’t do to go around without the
faintest clue of what Calcutta is.”
“Either I could run away and never go back to school again, maybe even
leave the country as a stowaway on a ship bound for Australia. Or I could risk
everything and confess to her. The answer was obvious: I was going to
Australia.”
“Then I remembered the newspaper. The employee had already thrown it
into the trash bin he was rolling across the floor. I fished it out, smeared as
it was with uneaten Danish, while he looked on. Because I am not a beggar, I
handed him the tickets for Dudu Fisher.”
“Terrence Des Pres, while acknowledging the need to
present the Holocaust as solemn, even sacred, also
defends representing the Holocaust using humor as a
more flexible mode of response . . . The paradox of the comic
approach is that by setting things at a distance it permits us a
tougher, more active response (280, 286). Krauss seems
intent on making the reader actively feel.”
— Lang (2009)
Being the “(...) earnest A-student (...)
often mars Krauss's efforts to live up
to her idols, especially when she's
trying to be funny. (I. B. Singer and
Borges had their playful side, but
imitating it doesn't work; studied
playfulness is no playfulness at all.)”
— Miller (2005) :c
03
Themes
The power of
the written word
writing, reading & translating
“When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I
tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the
world, because to live in an undescribed world was too
lonely.” - Leo
“IN ANOTHER ROOM, MY MOTHER SLEPT CURLED
NEXT TO THE WARMTH OF A PILE OF BOOKS” - Alma
Loneliness
the fear of disappearing
“There are two types of people in the world: those who
prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be
sad alone.” - Litvinoff
“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a
brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned,
unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a
gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone
who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I
would have given anything to be one of them.” - Leo
Grief and trauma
“12. HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD
START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT
WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH
THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE
MONTHS” - Alma
Grieving through trying to remember.
“Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God
a question that has no end. Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never
asked: What question? And now it's too late. Because I lost you,
Tateh. (...) Three years later, I lost Mameh. (...) I lost Fritzy. He
was studying in Vilna, Tateh--someone who knew someone
told me he'd last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to
the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in
time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I'd
taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when
I woke they were gone, (...) I lost the only woman I ever wanted
to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was
born. And I lost Isaac.” - Leo
The body
“Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind
my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears.
The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering:
spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my
parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in
the world while that which made me has ceased to exist:
my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big
production just to bend them. To everything a season, to
every time I've woken only to make the mistake of
believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside
me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can
take it all. Every morning, a little more” - Leo
Comparison of
generations
disillusionment here and there
“Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your
child to live without you.”- Leo
Identity
“ Look!" she said, pushing the paper over so I could see it.
"You can actually make sixteen different pie charts, each
of them accurate!" I looked at the paper. (...) "Then again,
you could always just stick with half English and half
Israeli, since--" "I'M AMERICAN!" I shouted. My mother
blinked. "Suit yourself," she said, and went to put the kettle
on to boil. From the corner of the room where he was
looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered: "No,
you're not. You're Jewish." ” - Alma
Lost Past
identity and language faced with trauma
“The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a
word. If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words
of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use
them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at
all. Life demanded a new language.” - Leo
Language
and the (lack of)
words for everything
“For her sixteenth birthday he gave her an English
dictionary and together they learned the words. What's
this? he'd ask, tracing his index finger around her ankle,
and she'd look it up. And this? he'd ask, kissing her elbow.
Elbow! (...) When they were seventeen they made love for
the first time, on a bed of straw in a shed. Later--when
things happened that they could never have imagined-she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that
there isn't a word for everything?” - Leo
“19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY
MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY
YEAR
Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and
gather at her feet, shallon, shallop, shallot, shallow, shalom,
sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense
flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the
floor were words she would never be able to use again, and
I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of
fear that one day she would be left silent.” - Alma
04
The Title and
The Ending
The ending…
She put both arms around me and hugged me.
I stopped tapping.
Alma, I said.
She said, Yes.
Alma, I said again.
She said,
Yes.
Alma, I said.
She tapped me twice.
“At times I believed that the last page of my book and the
last page of my life were one and the same, that when my
book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my
rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared
of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be
silent, the chair where I sat empty.” - Leo
The title:
How to interpret it? What
exactly is the history of love?
How the book-within-the-book
chapters (Age of…) fit into it?
Bibliography
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Codde, Philippe. 2011. “On the Problematic Omniscient Narrator in Nicole
Krauss's THE HISTORY OF LOVE”, The Explicator 69, 1: 48-50.
Fludernik, Monika. [2006] 2009. An Introduction to Narratology. (Translated by
Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik) Abingdon: Routledge
Krauss, Nicole. 2005. The History of Love. London: Penguin Books
Lang, Jessica. 2009. “The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the
Transmission of Holocaust Memory”. Journal of Modern Literature 33, 1: 43-56.
Miller, Laura. 2005. “'The History of Love': Under the Influence”, New York TImes.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/books/review/the-history-of-love-underthe-influence.html)
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Holocaust fiction”
(https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/holocaust-fiction)
Walter, Natasha. 2005. “Gursky’s gift”, The Guardian.
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/featuresreviews.guardianre
view19)
THANK YOU!
We have a
bonus for you.
Young Leo
trying to get
Alma to like
him ->
War and Peas
Thanks
CREDITS: This presentation template was
created by Slidesgo, including icons by
Flaticon, infographics & images by Freepik
Please keep this slide for attribution