We’ve been meaning to illegally post this review of Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love for ages. The illegality in full, after the jump.

Author dedications rarely merit noting, but in Nicole Krauss’ ambitious, ultimately unsatisfying second novel, they foreshadow indulgences to come. Aside from presenting photographs of her grandparents, Krauss gives a second, equally conspicuous nod to her husband: “For Jonathan, my life.” This line serves not only as a reminder that Krauss is married to the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work shares much with her own, but also to presage the tone of The History of Love: a world in which love is absolute, where it can, in fact, take over a life to the exclusion of all else — even, perhaps, to the detriment of a novel.

Leo Gursky’s life is Alma, the girl he loved in his Polish hometown before she fled to America in advance of the Nazis. When Gursky, having survived the Holocaust, follows her after the war, he learns she had been pregnant with their son when she left — and that, after having the baby and losing hope of seeing Leo again, she married her boss’ son in New York. Gursky tries his best to keep his distance, even as his son, who doesn’t know who his real father is, grows into a famous writer. But Leo cannot overcome his loss. The book
finds him as a retired locksmith wandering the city, leavening his loneliness with self-deprecating humor, and, on occasion, intentionally dropping coins in crowded stores, so that he not “die on a day when I went unseen.”

Krauss intertwines Gursky’s story with that of another Alma, a Brooklyn teenager whose father named her after a character in The History of Love, a little-known Spanish book by one Zvi Litvinoff that he found while traveling in South America. Alma’s father dies young, leaving her mother a permanent wreck and forcing the plucky Alma and her eccentric brother to fend for themselves. When a request arrives from a mysterious stranger for her mother to translate The History of Love, Alma turns literary sleuth. The book, we
gather, was actually written by a young Leo in tribute to his own Alma. He gave it to his fleeing friend Zvi to take with him to Chile for safekeeping during the war, but later, Litvinoff could not resist the temptation to publish the book as his own. He did it to impress the woman that he fell for in Valparaiso (Rosa, for those keeping score at home.)

It all makes for an intricate web meant to convey the power of the written word to forge connections and change lives. But while there’s some pleasure to be had in discerning the many links — no easy task, given all the manuscripts and letters and notes which crowd the book — the revelations pack little punch. For starters, it’s hard to credit the supposed potency of Leo’s book based on the excerpts provided — airy abstractions about the “Age of Silence,” when people spoke in gestures, or the “Age of String,” when they used “a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations.” The fate of Leo’s plagiarized book says as much about the power of writing to give or withhold authorial fame as it does about its power to transform readers.

Also limiting the puzzle’s payoff are the portrayals of lifelong love that lie at its heart. While Krauss is a talented stylist, her fable-like tales of grand passion are banal and unconvincing: “The sensation almost knocked the breath out of me. A tingling feeling caught fire in my nerves and spread. The whole thing must have happened in less than thirty seconds” is how Leo recalls falling for his Alma. It’s telling that Krauss’ depiction of the more mundane affections between the second Alma and her boyfriend is far more believable. We may live for the great love, but translating it to the page can be another matter.

We’re redacting the name of the author and the newspaper in which the review appeared for fear of getting anyone — ourselves, mainly — in trouble. But if you must know the name of the genius because you’d like to give him money/a hearty slap on the back/something to think about, email us and we’ll give you the deets.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Merges with the Literary
Ventures Fund

New York, NY-The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), a 38 year-old non-profit organization providing technical assistance to independent literary publishers, has announced its merger with the Literary Ventures Fund (LVF, Inc.), a newly formed venture philanthropy supporting literary publishing.

Founded in 1967 by the National Endowment for the Arts (as the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines), CLMP provides necessary technical assistance to a growing community of nearly 450 independent literary publishers. These small publishers-literary magazines, small presses, and online publishers-receive help with marketing, business plans, distribution, and fundraising to allow them to reach readers effectively in the competitive commercial marketplace.

The Literary Ventures Fund, Inc., founded by Jim Bildner, builds on the premise that given a level marketing playing field, exceptional literary works from small presses can thrive in the marketplace. Using a venture philanthropy model, the LVF will support small presses book by book, granting both funds and expertise. The goal of each philanthropic “investment” will be to ensure that each book reaches its market potential, whatever that might be given the specific book project. Over the course of a two to five-year horizon, a selected manuscript may be granted writer advances, specialized marketing expertise, funds for participation in targeted marketing programs, and money for author tours and related activities. Projects will be selected based on their literary merits; those books that do produce a profit over time will pay back a percentage of profits to the Fund to help support future projects. As the LVF catalogue of supported books grows, the mere granting of support itself may help advance a work through the literary world.