Story Lover

by Nicole Krauss

I’m not really sure what to say about this book other than I loved it. I loved all of it. Even the bits I don’t understand. Or the big picture I’m not quite getting. But what I love most of all are the slight truths that appear throughout the book. It’s scattered onto all the pages and are expressed through a man named Leo Gursky. Reading it felt a lot like reading Everything is Illuminated or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It had the same tone and color to it. I loved the beauty of Leo’s imagination. It’s one I’d love to read again, every 5 years, to see what resonates then.

“At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. 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.”

“I’d been so busy trying to find her that it hadn’t occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want to be found.”

[I guess it's a hard thing to imagine, that someone might not ever want to be found. Because aren't we all looking to be noticed? Have our inner beauty seen? Be discovered and loved? Is that not the human condition? Found in love. Talents unearthed. Loved by an individual or by masses. To be remembered and acknowledged.]

“Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?”

“Then I wondered if it ever really happened.”

[I have some memories like that. They seem to take place in a fog. Behind frosted glass. I can't ever tell if they were real or I imagined what I wish would have been.]

“I tried to think of what it was I wanted to say. ‘I’m not awake,’ I finally said. ‘Me either,’ said Bird.”

“And now, at the end of my life, I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.”

“Because of that wife who go 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.”

Double feature: Okay so going on my past conversation from Whiteout. I definitely didn’t see the ending of this one coming. I was pretty surprised at who the hooded killer was and his motives. Hahaha, it definitely had a bazaar twist to this one. Koodos! I was also entertained by the right balance of cheese and humor. Kind of a cool poster too.

There wasn’t anything surprising or new about this dramatic nail biter. I enjoyed it. Didn’t scream, but I did kind of guess and figure it out before all was revealed. Is it like that for everyone? Does everyone figure it out and when the truth comes out, we’re all sitting there in the theater saying, ‘I knew it!’? I think the most recent movie where I thought, ‘Good God I didn’t see that coming,’ was Angels and Demons.