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Nov. 23, 2007
A best-seller comes to town
History of Love author heads two events at book festival.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Nicole Krauss' most recent novel, The History of Love, has been called, among many praises, "hauntingly beautiful" and "vibrantly imagined." The best-selling author – who closes this year's Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival – does not seem to have let the accolades and success go to her head.
The storyline of The History of Love is somewhat complicated, but centres around two main characters: the elderly Leo Gursky, a Polish war refugee, and 14-year-old Alma Singer. The book has resonated with readers and become a best-seller. It has been translated into more than 25 languages.
In an interview with the Independent, Krauss discussed her creative approach.
"Basically, the way I work is, I stumble for a long time and, in this case, I eventually stumbled onto the voice of an old man at the end of his life, who became Leo, and his voice was such a natural thing for me to write. Then I just went with it and, in the process, I discovered that I was writing about certain things; loneliness for one, the difficulties of writing for another."
It is interesting that Krauss, being relatively young and female, first conceived of the character of Leo, rather than that of Alma. Krauss said that this was because "nobody, least of all me, would confuse myself with this old man" and this made it easier for her to "pour into this person some things that I would find in my own life very difficult to talk about."
The character of Alma came from "an almost musical sense that led me to begin to write another voice in the form of a young girl, because I wanted something to temper this older man's voice," explained Krauss. Once Alma was "born," she and Leo were on their own for a while, continued Krauss, "and then the third story, which was really the story of a lost manuscript, emerged and, I would say, for a good long year, I had these various strands and absolutely no sense of where they ought to meet and then, slowly, I did. And then, when the book was over, I could say, this is a book about such and such and such but, I promise you, that wasn't what I was thinking at the time."
Krauss was conscious, however, of using certain styles of writing even though, she said, she wasn't intentionally trying to achieve anything with her choices. In the sections of the book that focus on Leo, the sentences tend to be shorter; some only one word long.
"Very early on, there was the ... little phrase for him and putting a period after it was really like the mortal breath was being blown into him. He really came alive in that moment because that phrase seemed to me to sum up everything that this man was about, at the end of his life, about to die and still wanting, still longing and afraid to say more."
These short phrases "became a central pulse for him," she said, but "other things happened less instinctively. Alma's broken parts happened because ... it was very hard for me to get her right, partly because I have been a 14-year-old-girl, and one of the most important things to me when I am writing is a sense of real freedom, a real sense of invention, the excitement of invention and, when I'm writing, of impersonation.
"I don't want to feel that I'm telling the tale of what happened to me. I don't want to do the autobiographical because it's dull, it's done, it's been said already. I needed to divorce her from myself and so I ended up throwing out huge chunks and then just keeping these little bits where I felt her voice actually was quite alive. Then I gave the little titles and I thought this does make sense in a way; this is a very female adolescent thing to do – breaking the world down into lists in order to organize what's otherwise overwhelming."
Krauss attributes the book's popularity with its central themes.
"The book is full to capacity with lonely people," she explained, and readers are "people who are naturally comfortable pulling themselves apart from the world to sit down with a book. Maybe once upon a time that was a more natural thing than it is now but, at this point, in a world which is so high speed and which demands human interaction at all levels all the time, on the phone and e-mail, people who sit down alone with a book are, and I think they probably know ... a little something more about loneliness and I think somehow that predicament that all these characters share, and also the unwillingness to accept it, accept their alienation, the desire to somehow build bridges to others, I think that has something to do with it."
While Krauss did not necessarily set out to have the main characters in The History of Love be Jewish, she said that authors write, more or less, about what they know.
"When I am looking for a name of a character," she said, "I naturally gravitate toward a Jewish name. Those are the names that roll off my tongue, that are familiar with my life and so it's the easier thing, it's a natural thing to do. Along the way, I also discovered that I happened to be particularly interested in some of the peculiar complexities of being a Jew."
These complexities are rooted, explained Krauss, only partly in identity issues.
"What I wrote about is people who are suffering or have suffered a great loss and who are dealing with the aftermath of that and trying to find a way forward into their lives," she said about History. "In one case, that's somebody's whose loss was engendered by the Holocaust, in another case, it wasn't, but I think that loss is a particularly Jewish thing and not only because of the Holocaust. It is something that is written deep in our history, going back even before the loss of the Temple. It's at the very core. So I don't know if you would call that an issue of identity; maybe it's something existential, a particularly Jewish branch of existentialism."
Krauss said she temporarily lost her desire to write, after she finished History of Love and after she gave birth to her first child – "it is very hard, next to that child, to see really anything in the world as important enough," she explained.
"It took a long time for things and conditions and concerns to well up enough in me that I needed to compress them all and to make something out of them," she said, "and so, throughout all of that, I was writing without anything congealing together. It was all just bits of not much, but I think I'm now well on my way in something, which could fall apart tomorrow."
Krauss will undoubtedly impress book festival audiences with her candid, thoughtful and humble discussion at both book festival events she headlines: An Intimate Salon, at the home of Deborah Roitberg on Thursday, Nov. 29, 4-6 p.m.; and the closing presentation that night, at the Norman Rothstein Theatre, 8 p.m. For tickets and information, contact the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in person, by calling 604-257-5111 or by visiting www.jccgv.com.
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