53 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole KraussThe History of Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusions
Throughout The History of Love, Nicole Krauss alludes to many famous authors and literary works. In doing so, she comments on the connective power of storytelling and situates The History of Love within the legacy of world literature. Many of the characters are avid readers. Leo often visits the library and brings back audiobooks for Bruno, including Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and James Joyce’s Ulysses, which he can hear Bruno listening to through the walls. The allusion to Ulysses draws a parallel between Alma’s and Leo’s investigations, which take them all around New York City and the larger metropolitan area, and Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s protagonist whose day in Dublin spins out into an epic. In one of his letters, Leo’s son mentions reading Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles three times, perhaps trying to understand his unknown father, who would have been a contemporary of the Polish writer. There are also passing references to Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Nicanor Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, and others. All these literary allusions highlight the importance of literature and storytelling throughout human history.
Point of View
Krauss utilizes multiple points of view in The History of Love with four separate narrators. The novel has three first-person narrators—Leo, Alma, and Bird—and one omniscient third-person narrator who tells Zvi and Rosa Litvinoff’s story. Each narrator has a distinct voice and expresses themself in a unique way. Leo’s narration is thoughtful and articulate. He chooses his words carefully and spends much of his time dwelling on the past. Alma is more energetic, organizing her chapters in short bursts that jump from one story to another. In keeping with his younger age, Bird’s point of view is more freeform, rejecting conventions of grammar and punctuation. Finally, the third-person narrator offers a more traditional literary voice describing Litvinoff’s experiences. Krauss’s use of these disparate points of view illustrates the personal nature of language and its flexibility. Each character uses language in their own way to construct their unique reality.
Typographic Devices
The History of Love includes many visual and typographic elements that add depth to the novel. Just as words alone are sometimes inadequate for the characters in The History of Love, using certain visual techniques allows Krauss to express the story in different ways and continue to illustrate the diversity of language and communication. Visual elements, such as each character’s symbolic illustration, help to distinguish the different narrators immediately. Typography like Alma’s subheadings and the Hebrew letters that open Bird’s diary entries also help give the narrators visual signatures. Leo and Litvinoff’s chapters are the most conventional typographically, reflecting their age and status as more traditional writers. Krauss also uses white space, particularly in the final chapter when the point of view switches between Alma and Leo, sometimes with just a line or two of text on each page. The white space gives the few words that are there a greater weight, highlighting the importance of the meeting for the characters and the novel’s climax.
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By Nicole Krauss
