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Penny Matheson
posted 12 April 2006

This is not a book to pick up, put down, pick up again. I thought on a first disjointed reading that this was another 'magical realism' book - lots of improbable coincidences, inexplicable miracles, etc. Also I was a little prejudiced because I knew that Nicole Krauss was Jonathan Safran Foer's partner and in some ways The History of Love seemed a rerun of the same literary experimentation as his Everything Is Illuminated - very short chapters, important headlines, diagrams - and some of the same core subject matter: Central European Jews, the Holocaust, American Jewish young people on a search for identity and ancestry. Young eccentric people, old eccentric people and not much in between.

On a second reading it is clear that the author has carefully worked out every part of the narrative, every move in the plot, so that by the end you know exactly why everything has happened, why manuscripts and printed books have turned up unexpectedly, why the same book appears to have been written by two different people, why both authors say that the original manuscript was destroyed in a flood. There are in fact almost no coincidences.

It is a quite remarkably skilfully written book with the author using every device, different narrative voices, short chapters, long and explicit chapter headings, a switching backwards and forwards in time and the occasional detailed description - all complementing one another. For example the painstaking search for the real Alma in the New York records locates the novel very much in a real place in real time, and counterbalances the vague romantic extracts from 'The History of Love', the fictional book at the centre of the novel, as well as the two main characters' very fertile imaginations.

The themes of age and youth are explored in great detail. I particularly admired the empathetic description of Leo's efforts to make sure he is noticed - the intentional complaining in cafes, his stint as a life class model, the label with details of his burial plot. Typically in this novel, nothing is wasted - that label turns out to be vital to the denouement. It is such a sad book in some ways, and yet the author depicts the problems of old age and youth and bereavement with a very light touch and with much humour which seems to spring from the characters themselves.

I loved the description of the elderly gentlemen, Leo and Bruno, hurrying for the train. To quote briefly: 'We started to run. Not run, but move in such a way that two people who've worn away all manner of balls and sockets move if they want to catch a train…Bruno, who'd hit upon a way to pump his arms for speed that defies all description, edged me out, and for a moment I coasted while he quote unquote broke the wind….' Then there is the 'angel' on the floor where one of them has lain in icing sugar and moved his arms up and down. Or Bird upside down on the school roof suddenly appearing into view in the classroom below. I also loved the poetry of the obituaries which Litvinoff finds in Leo's sickroom, particularly the one about Kafka: 'Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me" …They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark trees….'

Despite my enthusiasm for the book and the feeling that this is one that one could enjoyably read many times, I do have a problem with it. As the many ecstatic reviews have said, it has great humanity, depth, humour, beauty etc., but the sum of its wonderful parts is still cold and I think that this is because of two weaknesses. One is the missing Alma who is in a way the centre of the book but is not really there. All we hear about her as a girl and grown up sounds uninteresting and unexceptional.

The other problem lies in the perfection of the writing and the book's construction. Its over-cleverness stops one from being swept along. I felt as if I was playing pelminism - even on the second reading, I was flicking backwards and forwards picking up clues. It made me think of another book I recently much admired: Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In some ways, I can't help feeling that both these two books could almost have been manuals for a rather superior creative writing course. The passion which would have made them really great is missing.

Shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.