A box of delights

There is a dizzying profusion of texts and writers in Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. There is an inset novel bearing the same name, written by one of her principal characters, Leo Gursky, excerpts from which are strewn throughout. Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish refugee in New York, doesn’t know whether his book was ever published. He gave his manuscript for safekeeping to his friend in the Polish village of Slonim when the sound of the Nazi juggernaut’s onward rush had become unmistakably loud, and then he and his friend were severed for ever.

There is another book, ‘Words for Everything’, which Gursky writes more than half a century after his first and mails to his son, Isaac Moritz, also a writer, who doesn’t know about Gursky’s existence or the fact that he is his real father. There is the first-person narrative of young Alma Singer. Alma’s mother, Charlotte, is translating from the Spanish a novel called ‘The History of Love’, purporting to have been written by a Jewish émigré in Chile called Zvi Litvinoff, for the mysterious Jacob Marcus.