A novel by Nicole Krauss. Possibly, one of the most beautiful things on the planet.
Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists. Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. They collected the world in small handfuls, and they were never unfair to each other, not once. When the sky grew dark, they parted with burrs in their clothes and leaves in their hair. When they were ten, he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven, he kissed her for the first time. When they were thirteen, they got into a fight and for three terrible weeks they didn’t talk. When they were fifteen, she showed him the scar on her left breast. Their love was a secret they told no one. He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. “What if I die?” she asked. “Even then,” he said. For her sixteenth birthday, he gave her a Polish-English dictionary and together they studied the words. “What’s this?” he’d ask, tracing his index finger around her ankle, and she’d look it up. “And this?” he’d ask, kissing her elbow. “ ‘Elbow’! What kind of word is that?” And then he’d lick it, making her giggle. When they were seventeen, they made love for the first time, on a bed of straw in a shed. Later—when things had happened that they never could have imagined—she wrote him a letter that said, “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”
Sad things can be unimaginably beautiful — Perhaps, only sad things can ever be as beautiful. And saddest thing about sad things (and hence, also the most beautiful thing) is that you can only be sad alone. Your sadness is completely and exclusively yours. On a slightly unrelated note, William Fitzsimmons’ music is living proof of this fact too.
The marriage was inevitable — The very reason I picked up this book was because Nicole Krauss was married to Jonathan Safran Foer (no doubt one of the greatest writers alive)1. And they do write similar books – about Jewish children searching for their identity in New York and meeting old male Holocaust survivors. In fact, the themes in the two books, which were released in the same year, are so similar that it led one reviewer to remark “Is it a cute postmodern joke?”. In my honest opinion, The History of Love is better than both of Foer’s books. Alas, we live in a sexist world.
The Holocaust was like the end of the world — And yet, it was so much worse.
It almost made me believe in a God — Not personally, of course.2 But, to tell a 12-year-old, who believes with all his heart that he is one of the 36 Lamed Vavniks, that God doesn’t exist would be as cruel as telling him that his mother isn’t really his mother. Maybe, the world wouldn’t be better off without religion contrary to what most atheists claim.
Life ought to be lived on paper — My life and the lives of everyone I know and the people I see on TV and the actors and actresses in movies and the characters in most works of fiction are all the same. There isn’t enough meaning, or beauty or purpose or {word that doesn’t exist yet and couldn’t possibly ever exist} in these lives.On the other hand, the lives in this book—Bird, Alma Singer, Leo Gursky, Isaac Moritz—are {word that doesn’t exist yet and couldn’t possibly ever exist}.
Every conversation, every moment and every breath in this book has the extraordinary quality of seeming as if the entire universe depended on it. On that single word! It’s as if the entire world would end if not for…
Could real life ever be like this? I don’t think so. Earlier this year, for about a week, I tried this experiment where I wrote my daily life as a work of fiction. The act of writing your life changes the way you live, your life is more {word that doesn’t exist yet and couldn’t possibly ever exist}. You start thinking about your life as a story rather than a list of events, conversations and commutes. But it requires you to spend a lot of time everyday and most people don’t have enough time for it (that’s why I stopped after a week). Besides, even if you did do this for a prolonged period, I think you’d adapt to it. The real problem with the world is that there is too much happiness.
- I should become a writer — Yeah. Fuck programming.
- The second reason is that the cover of the book resembles this blog’s design. ↩
- I could never believe something that isn’t true. Like the previous sentence, for example. ↩
August 6th, 2009
by Aditya Mukherjee
“‘i’ before ‘e’ unless after ‘c’ or when sounding like ‘ay’” :)
August 7th, 2009
by James Harris
Very nice…but why is this on Planet Ubiquity?
September 5th, 2009
by Abi Raja
The Author
Aditya, thanks. Fixed it.
James, I changed the feed for Planet Mozilla but forgot to change it for Planet Ubiquity. Just emailed Zach asking him to use the feed that only syndicates my Ubiquity-related posts.