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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A most unusual and original piece of fiction -- and not to be missed.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Her distinctive voice is both plangent and wry, and her imagination encompasses many worlds. [21 Feb 2005, p.154]
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Candace Fertile
Nothing in this novel is a mere verbal pirouette. The authenticity of the humour contrasted with the sadness is extraordinarily moving. Krauss is the real thing; The History of Love is a novel to be read and reread.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Kasia Boddy
What makes this book outstanding is the graceful and exact quality of the writing, and an unusual warmth.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Alastair Sooke
Thankfully, Krauss, who is married to another playful novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer, knows how to massage the heartstrings as well as the head. As its wisecracking Jewish protagonist might say, this book gets you in your kishkes.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Barbara Liss
Alma and Leo alternate the telling of their complicated stories, which unwind to an inevitable, satisfying conclusion. Krauss writes superbly in both voices and never loses control of her wildly spinning tops.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Neel Mukherjee
It takes one’s breath away to read the way Krauss has braided the strands together, achieving an incandescent meditation on how the testament of writing to love might be the only possible salvation for the bruised lot of mankind.
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Toby Lichtig
The History of Love is more than a good yarn; and despite the quest for authorship at the core of its mechanics -recalling Borges, Calvino, Auster - it is more than a (derivative) play on the postmodern detective story.
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Favorable
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The Independent Mathew J Reisz
This is undoubtedly the work of a formidably talented novelist.
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Favorable
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The Independent Charlie Lee-Potter
Krauss's obsession with language makes for a novel full of feeling but entirely lacking in sensuality.
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Favorable
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LA Weekly Claire Messud
The considerable pleasure of this book resides, at least in part, in its complicated and unexpected interweaving of literary influences.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Sarah Conrad Weisman
Krauss ("Man Walks into a Room") develops the story beautifully, incrementally revealing details to expose more and more of the mystery behind Leo's book. [15 Apr 2005, p.74]
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Favorable
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Village Voice Rachel Aviv
Like a caricature of Great Literature, the book skates through impossibly abstract topics -- the birth of art, language, romance, and vulnerability.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Ron Charles
In the final pages, the fractured stories of The History of Love fall together like a desperate embrace.
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Favorable
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Booklist Donna Seamon
Venturing into Paul Auster territory in her graceful inquiry into the interplay between life and literature, Krauss is winsome, funny, and affecting. [15 Mar 2005, p.1265]
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
The final pages of the novel contain a discovery so lovely, so poignant and right and ultimately illuminative, that I was almost willing to forgive her every coy, clever cartwheel in the book.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Beth Kephart
One could say a lot of things about the meaning of all this--about how a single story is in fact everybody's story; about how books are what help us ask life's big questions; about how, when we pass away, what is left is the stuff we have collected. I like all those meanings, and I think and write on them myself from time to time. But I also simply like this book, no matter where it came from. [8 May 2005, p.C5]
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Krauss has created a crazy spiderweb of associations and missed connections. Miraculously, she actually manages to make all the delicate filaments not only hold together but support the weight of the enormously ambitious narrative.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Megan Harlan
Krauss beautifully maps a literary labyrinth on which the hopes and desires of her characters depend.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps Ms. Krauss's History of Love moving (and keeps its reader offbalance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Laura Miller
It's true that if Krauss is a writer whose gift lies closer to Carson McCullers's or Harper Lee's than to Singer's she will probably never get her fair share of glory. You don't win the Nobel Prize for writing about the inner lives of 14-year-old girls.
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Mixed
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The New Republic Ruth Franklin
But Krauss, like all sentimentalists, is unable to stop there. She refuses to hold anything back, to allow the reader to do the necessary imaginative work of connecting the pieces without unnecessary interference.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Mystery (the goad that aims at invigorating a novel's
pace) manages to be no more than a puzzle (a drag that slows it down). The writer's connections are closer to tangles. Only disconnect, readers may wish to tell her. When not frustrated, they may find themselves close to cheering. [1 May 2005, p.R5]
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Mixed
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The Guardian Natasha Walter
Krauss is undoubtedly an entertaining, humane and intelligent writer, but this novel is just too neat and too sweet for her talent to fly freely.
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Mixed
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The Economist
In the case of Nicole Krauss's much-touted second novel, perhaps the bar has been raised higher than this charming, though hardly heart-wrenching, book can reach.
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Unfavorable
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London Review Of Books James Wood
The result is an inability to control the flow of sentiment, and an uneasy sense that the novel’s Jewishness has been warped into fraudulence and histrionics by the force of Krauss’s identification with it.
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Unfavorable
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New York Review Of Books Louis Begley
Alas, Krauss has been very careless about facts, to a degree that is disturbing enough for this reviewer to ask himself, reluctantly, whether she is not trying to exploit the emotional appeal of a subject she could have well left alone.
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