Libretto:: Nightstand

Everything in The History of Love is true. It’s true that lonely octogenarian Leo Gursky feels connected with the world only because his upstairs neighbor, Bruno, delivers his mail sometimes and late at night knocks on the pipes to see if Leo’s still alive. (Two return knocks mean “yes”; one means “no.”) It’s true 15-year-old Alma is on a mission to find her mother a suitable new husband while simultaneously trying to convince her brother he’s not really the Messiah, even as he constructs an ark in the lot across from their Brooklyn apartment. And it’s true that somebody in Chile published a book a long time ago called The History of Love, whose main character Alma is named for, her mother is commissioned by a mysterious stranger to translate from Spanish, and through which Leo is surprisingly connected with them all. But the facts behind these truths lie just beyond reach, allowing the reader to savor the delicious shifting palimpsest of the real and the merely imagined, wished for, remembered. Born in 1974, Krauss is of a generation of postmodernists seemingly intent upon the extinction of narrative. But her deft layering of images, complex characters, and interwoven plot lines hark refreshingly back to a time when structure and craft were essential elements of literature, and renew my hope for the future of the form. Combination mystery, dysfunctional family case study, and lush poem sequence, The History of Love resolves itself in a heartbreakingly moving ending, revealing long-sought-for facts, yes, and driving us to amazon.com for more of Krauss’ books. More than anything, though, The History of Love is a paean to language and its alchemical ability to be made flesh. Leo’s and Alma’s and Charlotte’s stories symbolize our own – tales we translate and refine and tell out into the world until their truths elicit – maybe – two knocks in response. Sarah Jensen