reading rainbow

now you know who wrote the book of love

the posh deluxe reading rainbow report

the history of love by nicole krauss

i have to admit, this is one of those books that you’ll see in the window of every single airport bookstore. for the past few months, whenever i passed one of those shops, this book would blend in with the latest from jackie collins and john grisham.

then, on one of my trips to boston, i finished whatever i was reading and, in order to survive the next several hours of flight with potentially screaming children, ran into a bookstore.

this was the only book that didn’t have a cat, gun or flower on the cover.

i actually didn’t even read this book on the plane (jetblue’s tv screens were too tempting), so it’s been sitting in my “to-read” pile for a while.

i can’t believe i let it sit there for so long.

you guys, this book is beautiful.

this book is too amazing, too wonderful, too heartbreaking to dwell in airport news stands.

this book deserves its own special room, with simple curtains and clean walls, where people can sit and read and absorb it.

i’ll tell you that it’s about a fifteen year old girl named alma, who misses her dead father and searches for a way to drive her mother’s fog of sadness away. it’s about an old jewish man named leo gursky, who escaped the nazis in poland and still pines for the girl who left him behind. and i have to mention bird, alma’s brother, who believes himself to possibly be the messiah and gives alma a life jacket to protect her from the flood that he knows will surely destroy the earth.

but you know what? the book is even more than that. and i can’t remotely begin to try to describe it. instead, i’ll offer up a few pieces from the dozens of pages i dog eared (i know, you’re not supposed to hurt books but certain lines were too extraordinary to go unmarked).

here is the voice of leo:
“at the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. perhaps that’s why i’ve never been able to throw anything away. perhaps that’s why i hoarded the world: with the hope that when i died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one i lived.”

here is the voice of alma:

“i had never heard of centre street, so i asked for directions. it wasn’t that far so i decided to walk, and while i did i imagined rooms all over the city that housed archives no one has ever heard of, like last words, white lies, and false descendants of catherine the great.”

here is something that i read several times so that i wouldn’t forget:

“because of that wife who got tired of waiting for her soldier, i lived. all he had to do was poke the hay to discover that there was nothing beneath it; if he hadn’t had so much on his mind i’d have been found. sometimes i wonder what happened to her. i like to imagine the first time she leaned in to kiss that stranger, how she must have felt herself falling for him, or perhaps simply away from her loneliness, and it’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.”

in many ways, this book reminded me of “extremely loud and incredibly close” by jonathan safran foer. maybe it’s the voice of a child narrator, or the idea of searching for something unknown. with the turn of each page, i got closer to moving to new york just so i could wander the streets and discover clues to a mystery whose existence would only be realized upon its solution.

another thing i should mention is that there’s a book within this book, and that book is also called “the history of love.” occasionally, alma will include a chapter from the book, which, in my mind, is old and cracked and smells like ancient secrets.

from a chapter entitled “the birth of feeling”:

“having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. they wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. people became addicted to feeling. they struggled to uncover new emotions. it’s posible that this is how art was born. new kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: the eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.

even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. from time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. and then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.”

i’d like to discover a new feeling. i hope i do. and maybe, if you read this book, you will, too.

LINKS

funnest truthful sentence you can say today: dude. a man burned the burning man. and you MUST check out his mugshot. all i can say is, anything that makes hippies cry makes me happy.

can the american cancer society run for president? please?
if yr house gets hit by a car ten different times, i think god just MIGHT be effing with you. just a little.

GAH! SPIDERS!

george w.’s favorite album of all time: built to spill’s “keep it like a secret.”

© 2007 Poshdeluxe.