The History of Love

The History of Love
Nicole Krauss

Recommended by Jay Lalezari

Reading this book was like opening up a piece of origami you found on the subway and finding a secret message written only for you.

This book laughs at my inability to read fiction for two years.

This is a book within a book, within a story that holds a smaller story which turns out to be the cellular structure of the author. I cannot possibly provide the proper words to describe THAT.

"When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition." (Pg 114 - 115)

"And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I." (Pg 164)

"The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say not that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely." (Pg 72)

Link to the book on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/History-Love-Novel-Nicole-Krauss/dp/0393060349