A história do amor de Nicole Krauss.
A história como o oposto de desaparecer.
Entrevista dela ao Guardian:
The novel is, in her own description, 'a book about the way in which books can change people's lives'. It's also about love, loss and longing - 'embarrassing things,' as Krauss calls them, which she partly puts in the witty, unplangent voice of an old Jewish locksmith called Leo Gursky. Krauss's sentences are precise but never cold: 'We met each other when we were young,' one character writes, 'before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.'
Her characters are ideas with lives. Leo Gursky is a person who makes others famous, a great writer who nobody knows about but millions have read; he's a brilliant invention, perhaps more brilliant than the book he has written, which we read in lyrical snatches as it's translated. How the book came into the translator's hands is part of a structure of maze-like qualities and phenomenal (eventual) neatness.
There are other voices and other books: European-Jewish and Latin-American fictions are mistaken for one another, or actually become one another, with all the melding of philosophy, humour and magic that implies. And Krauss's range of apparent influences - Bruno Schultz, Jorge Luis Borges, Grace Paley - is such that The History of Love turns out to be, perhaps, all of the fictional books it's about.
Over lunch, we are surrounded by the sunny sounds of Brooklyn life - the continuous song of a playground in the distance. Krauss speaks in a small, sprightly, careful voice. Although she possesses a quiet kind of glamour, there is also a little mischief about her; her easy smile reveals a tiny gap between her teeth.
Although Krauss, who is 30, will be seen as part of a new generation of novelists to whom the word 'wunderkind' is liberally applied, she says: 'I honestly kind of avoid meeting other writers. When I was younger, I was amazed by writers and I thought they were some kind of angels. But when writers get together, sadly, they tend not to talk about the great philosophical issues of the day, but rather, who is your publisher and did you see that awful review that so and so did? It's really disappointing.'
Krauss grew up on Long Island, where, she says, 'the houses were pretty far from each other. I didn't really know my neighbours'. She immersed herself in reading - 'crumbly yellow paperbacks', a biography of Henry Miller, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Roth's Portnoy's Complaint - all by the age of 12.
At 13, she was taught One Hundred Years of Solitude at school and had an epiphany. The teacher said it was a book about nostalgia and she thought: 'A word for the thing I feel.' What she was nostalgic for is something she's had to think about a good deal. It didn't make sense to be a teenager and have that feeling. Her first book - Man Walks Into a Room, about a person with amnesia - might be seen as an investigation of that question, just as much as The History of Love, which is dedicated to her grandparents.
'I think it has something to do with - or everything to do with - the fact that my grandparents came from these places that we could never go back to, because they'd been lost,' she reflects. 'And people were lost. My great-grandparents and lots of great-uncles and aunts died in the Holocaust. I don't know; maybe it's something that's inherited in the blood, a sense of a loss of that thing and a longing for it.
'When the word nostalgia was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.'
In The History of Love, the symptoms of loss are so well-judged and so entertaining that they barely leave room for considerations about the cause. There is Alma, who writes volumes of notebooks on the subject of 'How to survive in the wild'; her brother, who jumps off buildings and thinks he's the new messiah; their mother, a translator who exists in a pile of dictionary pages and has a habit of looking into a glass of water 'as if there were a fish in it that only she could see'.
The death of the father in this family is a constant presence, but only as they themselves realise how long this has been going on does the reader's heart begin to break.
In her first year at Stanford University, Krauss went to a lecture given by Joseph Brodsky, and handed him some poems she had written. She didn't think she would hear from him, but the next morning he called, and they spent seven hours working on her poems.
As a teenager, Krauss had a crush on German philosopher Walter Benjamin. She ended up marrying Jonathan Safran Foer, not a bad second choice, given that Benjamin died in tragic circumstances in 1940 (that, of course, had been part of the attraction).
The two writers, whose second books have been published within months of one another, have met with extraordinary critical success, and both have signed major film deals (Foer's first book, Everything is Illuminated, will be actor Liev Schreiber's directorial debut and is due to open in the US this summer; The History of Love will be directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who made Y Tu Mamá TambiéŽn and the third Harry Potter).
What's extraordinary, and quite moving, is not that they are both writers (people ask her whether they compare notes; the answer is no, they don't read each other's books until they're in proof form) but how much they must have shared before they even knew of each other's existence.
They met through their Dutch publisher, when their first books were just out. He had edited a book about artist Joseph Cornell; she had written her thesis about him. Both are preoccupied with the past.
Krauss says: 'First, it has to do with why we love each other, long before we ever get to the fact that we're writers or write about similar things. I think we come from such a similar place. His grandmother survived the Holocaust. I think we intuited a lot of the same things in the silences of our childhood.'
In Krauss's book, Leo Gursky is at work on another novel. It's called Words for Everything. Does she think there are words for everything, in the end?
'No, I guess. Unfortunately. And fortunately, too. But great to try to write a book with that title. I could never do it, but Leo could. Gloriously,' she says with a laugh, 'he'll never get reviewed!'The novel is, in her own description, 'a book about the way in which books can change people's lives'. It's also about love, loss and longing - 'embarrassing things,' as Krauss calls them, which she partly puts in the witty, unplangent voice of an old Jewish locksmith called Leo Gursky. Krauss's sentences are precise but never cold: 'We met each other when we were young,' one character writes, 'before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.'
Her characters are ideas with lives. Leo Gursky is a person who makes others famous, a great writer who nobody knows about but millions have read; he's a brilliant invention, perhaps more brilliant than the book he has written, which we read in lyrical snatches as it's translated. How the book came into the translator's hands is part of a structure of maze-like qualities and phenomenal (eventual) neatness.
There are other voices and other books: European-Jewish and Latin-American fictions are mistaken for one another, or actually become one another, with all the melding of philosophy, humour and magic that implies. And Krauss's range of apparent influences - Bruno Schultz, Jorge Luis Borges, Grace Paley - is such that The History of Love turns out to be, perhaps, all of the fictional books it's about.
Over lunch, we are surrounded by the sunny sounds of Brooklyn life - the continuous song of a playground in the distance. Krauss speaks in a small, sprightly, careful voice. Although she possesses a quiet kind of glamour, there is also a little mischief about her; her easy smile reveals a tiny gap between her teeth.
Although Krauss, who is 30, will be seen as part of a new generation of novelists to whom the word 'wunderkind' is liberally applied, she says: 'I honestly kind of avoid meeting other writers. When I was younger, I was amazed by writers and I thought they were some kind of angels. But when writers get together, sadly, they tend not to talk about the great philosophical issues of the day, but rather, who is your publisher and did you see that awful review that so and so did? It's really disappointing.'
Krauss grew up on Long Island, where, she says, 'the houses were pretty far from each other. I didn't really know my neighbours'. She immersed herself in reading - 'crumbly yellow paperbacks', a biography of Henry Miller, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Roth's Portnoy's Complaint - all by the age of 12.
At 13, she was taught One Hundred Years of Solitude at school and had an epiphany. The teacher said it was a book about nostalgia and she thought: 'A word for the thing I feel.' What she was nostalgic for is something she's had to think about a good deal. It didn't make sense to be a teenager and have that feeling. Her first book - Man Walks Into a Room, about a person with amnesia - might be seen as an investigation of that question, just as much as The History of Love, which is dedicated to her grandparents.
'I think it has something to do with - or everything to do with - the fact that my grandparents came from these places that we could never go back to, because they'd been lost,' she reflects. 'And people were lost. My great-grandparents and lots of great-uncles and aunts died in the Holocaust. I don't know; maybe it's something that's inherited in the blood, a sense of a loss of that thing and a longing for it.
'When the word nostalgia was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.'
In The History of Love, the symptoms of loss are so well-judged and so entertaining that they barely leave room for considerations about the cause. There is Alma, who writes volumes of notebooks on the subject of 'How to survive in the wild'; her brother, who jumps off buildings and thinks he's the new messiah; their mother, a translator who exists in a pile of dictionary pages and has a habit of looking into a glass of water 'as if there were a fish in it that only she could see'.
The death of the father in this family is a constant presence, but only as they themselves realise how long this has been going on does the reader's heart begin to break.
In her first year at Stanford University, Krauss went to a lecture given by Joseph Brodsky, and handed him some poems she had written. She didn't think she would hear from him, but the next morning he called, and they spent seven hours working on her poems.
As a teenager, Krauss had a crush on German philosopher Walter Benjamin. She ended up marrying Jonathan Safran Foer, not a bad second choice, given that Benjamin died in tragic circumstances in 1940 (that, of course, had been part of the attraction).
The two writers, whose second books have been published within months of one another, have met with extraordinary critical success, and both have signed major film deals (Foer's first book, Everything is Illuminated, will be actor Liev Schreiber's directorial debut and is due to open in the US this summer; The History of Love will be directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who made Y Tu Mamá TambiéŽn and the third Harry Potter).
What's extraordinary, and quite moving, is not that they are both writers (people ask her whether they compare notes; the answer is no, they don't read each other's books until they're in proof form) but how much they must have shared before they even knew of each other's existence.
They met through their Dutch publisher, when their first books were just out. He had edited a book about artist Joseph Cornell; she had written her thesis about him. Both are preoccupied with the past.
Krauss says: 'First, it has to do with why we love each other, long before we ever get to the fact that we're writers or write about similar things. I think we come from such a similar place. His grandmother survived the Holocaust. I think we intuited a lot of the same things in the silences of our childhood.'
In Krauss's book, Leo Gursky is at work on another novel. It's called Words for Everything. Does she think there are words for everything, in the end?
'No, I guess. Unfortunately. And fortunately, too. But great to try to write a book with that title. I could never do it, but Leo could. Gloriously,' she says with a laugh, 'he'll never get reviewed!'
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1484082,00.html
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