Written in a deceptively simple prose, this is the story of a Polish man who emigrates to Chile to escape the Germans and writes his only book: The History of Love. Krauss’s novel is the story of the discovery of this work and how it came to light years later, when the original writer of The History of Love is on a trek to find the muse of his work. Little does he know that his book shaped lives and transformed little histories.
One of the ruminations on love involves a comparison with painter Giacometti’s idea that “sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”
Another passage of note is on “The Birth of Feeling,” part of the history of love: “The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.) Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. It’s possible that this is how art was born.”
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