But.

This sentence, one word with a period used throughout the novel to characterize Leo Gursky’s “butiful” (79) world, “I kept walking. I went into the drugstore and knocked over a display of KY Jelly. But. My heart wasn’t in it” (76). This word, this one sentence characterizes Leo’s life. He wrote this great novel. But. He had to flee Poland and left it with a friend who he never saw again and who published it in his own name. He fell utterly in love. But. Her parents sent her to America and by the time he found her their son was five and she’d remarried and had a second son. He never knew his son. Looking at a picture of his son in the paper, Leo “wanted him to turn his eyes just to [him] just as he had to whoever had shaken him from his thoughts. But. He couldn’t” (77). Why? Because the photo is above an article announcing his son’s death. Krauss uses fragments and short sentences throughout her novel, often to call our attention to the scene, as in “A fly landed on his shriveled penis. He mumbled some words” (158), so intentionally, so interspersed with longer sentences. This same intention is evident in how she punctuates, uses space on the page.

Colons, semicolons, dashes, lists, italics, roman numeraled lists, bulleted lists, numbered lists, letters: Krauss keeps your eyes and mind popping with her skill and her willingness to roll around in all the tools available to her. What a language! What a life! The only words on one page (Gursky is trying to think of a title, “LAUGHING AND CRYING” (27). And then the next, “I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn’t right. I added another word”, followed by only these words on the next page, “LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING”, and on for four more pages, creating a verisimilitude to how time passed as Leo tried to come up with a title for the story of his life. The sections in Alma’s point of view are broken up into numbered, titled subchapters. There is one subchapter at the end of a section titled, “23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN” (152). No words follow it. And that space on the page communicatse so much about Alma’s being at a loss to understand her quirky brother (whose journal she’s just read). A third technique, but not the last that Krauss uses to express her delight of language and tell a story that has the capability to move a reader, to change a reader (as it did me) is her use of the surprise at the end of the sentence.

So many of Krauss’s sentences lead you to places you did not expect to go. About a goose that was supposedly the spirit of someone’s grandma, “It stayed for two weeks straight, honking in the rain, and when it left the grass was covered with turds” (99). Expressing how she often does how beauty and harsh reality are often intermingled. “She said all I had to do was sit naked on a metal stool in the middle of the room and then, if I felt like it, which she was hoping I would, dip my body into a vat of kosher cow’s blood and roll on the large white sheets of paper provided” (75). A sentence that expresses how sometimes overwhelming and ridiculous life can be. “Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness” (129). Car is what I was thinking. And yet, loneliness broke my heart just the same, perhaps more so, since it’s much more difficult to understand in the scheme of human tragedy.

What a language! What a life!  The History of Love inspired me with its intention. To be truthful, my first reaction was to just give up now, because I just couldn’t see me ever reaching this level of prose. After my ego settled down though, I too wanted to burst out in the coffee shop where I finished the book: What a language! What a life!