All We Need Is Love

All We Need Is Love Stacey Gottlieb The History of Love Nicole Krauss W. W. Norton http://www.wwnorton.com 320 pages; cloth, $23.95 When Leopold (Leo) Gursky first describes himselfas "[t]he man who had become invisible," the year is 1945, and he is twenty-five—a just-off-theboat Russo-Polish émigré arrived in New York—the lone member ofhis family to have escaped the Nazi's terror, now further robbed ofthe single thing that has managed to sustain him over five excruciating years: his one true love—along, he learns, with a son he'll never know. Some six decades later, still mourning these losses, still struggling to maintain his sense of self, the octogenarian has developed a penchant for making the occasional scene when out on the town. These slapstick encounters read like trivial social gaffes—knocking over store displays, dropping a pocketful ofchange, asserting agency at the Athlete's Foot—but they are executed with a serious aim. As Leo puts it, "I try to make a point of being seen," no small admission given that, to his mind, seeing is more man believing, it's a means of conferring being —a bit ofCartesian philosophy turned over rather ceaselessly in The History ofLove, Nicole Krauss's second novel and a sophomore effort that offers further indication of a writer looking down the barrel of a lengthy career. Actually, these shared desires—to (see and) be seen, to (make and) be made real—are like wellworn worry stones passed between the fidgety fingers of virtually every character Krauss sends our way. Exhibit B: Alma Singer, the plucky, fifteen-year-old Brooklynite to whom the other central narrative of History belongs. Alma is swift to assure inquiring minds that she is fine, thank-you-very-much, but, like Leo, she is living in the shadow of a loved one's death, actively mining the past in order to navigate the present, and writing it all down—a habit that helps map out, if not make sense of, the pain while neatly generating a textual record for future like-minded pleasure-seekers to read. Love is the premise from which all other stories grow. Still, neither one ofthese strong-willed protagonists is content simply to act as theirown scribe, leaving their fate to the whimsy oftime and chance alone. On the contrary. Leo is set to doffeven his skivvies for some much-needed attention—quite literally giving the shirt offhis back to be noticed, doing a stint in the buff to have his still-vital flesh be seen. For her part, Alma is on the hunt for her namesake, imagining that this single puzzle piece might bring a picture of her history into greater relief, might shed light on how she was, in all senses of the word, conceived. Alma is also anxious (and in more than the standard-issue adolescent way) to bring verity to the stories that have served as proxies for a more wellrounded (read: father filled; secure) family life. Invoking the already large-looming tropes ofthe Holocaust and 9/11, Alma even endeavors to acquire her father's boyish camping expertise, skills that take on a solemn, survivalist tone in translation, i.e.: she's memorized the Universal Edibility Test ("there, was always the chance that I'd have to survive in someplace other than North America") and can assemble her father's pup tent in a few seconds flat. These lone facts and fables, "[m]emories my mother gave to me," expand to run concurrently with herown and, soon enough, with Leo's and a slew ofrelated others' as well. Once all these histories are up and humming in tandem, the themes already articulated in our principals' segments—of great loves gained and lost, of the vanished and displaced, of the turning to and turning out of texts, of the resurrected and the revived —resurface and repeat, hall-of-mirrors-style, in the secondary characters' tales (as with Alma's wildly endearing, aspirationally devout brother, Bird; and Leo's codependent, quixotic best friend, Bruno). True, these running sagas occupy different points in time and space, but their casts and concerns are overarchingly...