The History of Love

By: Nicole Krauss

“[W]ritten almost entirely under the influence of…an assemblage of canonical figures including (to list only those explicitly cited in ‘The History of Love’), Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz.”

“It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss’s second novel, ‘The History of Love,’ to ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,’ the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast. The second, and more significant, is that Krauss is one of fiction’s dutiful daughters. She has written almost entirely under the influence of powerful literary fathers, an assemblage of canonical figures including (to list only those explicitly cited in ‘The History of Love’), Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. That the relatively young and untried Foer has joined them in her pantheon represents only a slight deviation from form.”

Read the full 2005 review by Laura Miller in The New York Times.

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Nicole Krauss

credit: Image Credit: nicolekrauss.com by Patric Shaw

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists.” She is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by The New Yorker for their “Twenty Under Forty” list. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories,and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

Source: NicoleKrauss.com.

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