Girl Detective

Even though I know the difference, I made this grammar mistake recently, and thought it merited re-posting.

Use the word less for uncountable items: I ate less Jell-o than he did.

Use fewer for items you can count: I ate fewer French fries than she did.

This means that every single sign in stores that reads “x items or less” is incorrect. Instead it should read “x items or fewer,” as Mrs. Incandenza campaigned for in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Related: the same rule holds for amount and number. Use amount for things that can’t be counted, like water, and number for things that can, like people.

I’m now also writing on food at Simple Good and Tasty, a Twin Cities group that celebrates local food, and is dedicated to bridging the gap from farmer to consumer. I’ll be writing about every other week, but go check out the site, especially if you’re a foodie in the Twin Cities. There are some great events coming up.

My first post is about one of the most consumed food items in our house: yogurt.

Here’s the variation I’m making right now, adapted because 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy complained the one from the article wasn’t sweet enough.

Greek-style Honey Yogurt, makes about 3 cups, or 4 3/4-cup servings.

1 quart whole, local milk
2 tablespoons Organic Valley yogurt, vanilla or plain
1/4 cup Ames Farm honey

Heat milk in top of double boiler over simmering water to just past 180 degrees F.

Cool pan in ice bath to just below 120 degrees F. Thin yogurt with a bit of the warm milk, then add yogurt and honey. Whisk to incorporate.

Keep mixture in pan or transfer to glass bowl. (I use my 1-quart Pyrex.) Wrap in dish towels and place in oven with light on. (Light will warm oven to about 100 degrees.) Do not place towels near open flame or too close to light. Leave for 4 to 8 hours.

Line a quart-size sieve with thin cloth dish towel or layers of cheese cloth. Place over bowl to let whey drain, and refrigerate at least four hours, or overnight. Save whey to put in smoothies instead of juice.

Serve as you would store-bought yogurt, with granola, cereal, or a splotch of jam. It’s rich and thick, so I use less than a cup per person. Place remainder in covered container in refrigerator. It will keep for several days.

ETA: I added a line about using the drained whey in smoothies. This has been really useful.

I love nicknames, and use them frequently with my sons 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy. (See? I just did.) Guppy, however, is not a fan. Whenever I call him by his full name or deploy a nickname for him, such as Goose, Mr. Guppy-pants, Mr. Cranky-pants, Captain Huggy-Face, Grumpster Demon, Punkin, Punka, Punk, Pookie, Pookie Pants, You, Hey You, Boy, etc. You get the picture.

When he began to protest this past year, his vocabulary wasn’t quite up to the challenge.

“Mom!” he’d shout. “I keep promising you! Only call me Guppy!” More recently, though, he’s become more precise.

“Mom! Call me Guppy!”

To which I respond, “Please, say please.”

What do I do when I’m feeling low from a cold? Cook a three-course supper, apparently, as I did last night. In my defense, the cauliflower and lettuces were going bad, and had to be used, and all three dishes together took less than an hour to put on the table.

First was the spaghetti with cheese and black pepper, which I had to make once I saw it at Smitten Kitchen. Funny, I often have that reaction to Deb’s recipes.

Then the roasted cauliflower with kalamata vinaigrette, from one of Gourmet’s last issues. 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy had to be coaxed, but only a bit to eat theirs, and my husband G. Grod had seconds, and said this is the only cauliflower he’s ever liked.

I topped a mix of green and red leaf lettuce with Romano cheese from the pasta, and the kalamata vinaigrette from the cauliflower, and added some ripe slices of peeled Bosc pear.

Even sniffly, this was not a hard meal for me to make, and all three guys liked at least one of the items. Guppy snarfed down the noodles. This was a winner.

I’d read about and been interested in Logicomix, a comic-book fictional history of Bertrand Russell and his struggles to clarify the foundations of logic and mathematics. My husband G. Grod is a math geek, and a fan of Russell and Kurt Godel, who is instrumental in the history, as well as Alan Turing, who plays an important role in framing the end of the narrative. I’ve become a fan by association of these great thinkers, so the subject interested me. Then when it was added to The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books I decided to buy it for G. Grod for Christmas, as a not unselfish gift that still wasn’t exactly a bowling ball with “Homer” on it.

Doxiadis seems to be the instigator for the book, but it is certainly a team effort, both in production and in narrative, since all the creators are also included in and commenting on the work, a clever method of self-reference, a logic term that Russell’s Paradox is an example of. Christos Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science and author of a book on Turing. He was consulted and involved both to confirm the broad strokes of Russell’s story and legacy, and to engage the creative team in an effort to better the book. Art and color were done by husband/wife team of Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. Interchanges among the creators frame most chapters, and offer commentary on the ambiguities in the story. Russell mostly narrates his own story through a frame of a lecture, starting with his childhood as an orphan in the severely regulated house of his grandmother and his introduction to mathematics by a charismatic tutor.e

The authors do an admirable job of portraying both the characters involved in the evolution of logic and mathematics, and in the explication of some complex examples of both, which could easily have bogged down the narrative, which instead proceeds at a lively clip. Russell is a typical hero in the classic mode: orphaned, struggling in childhood with overbearing adults, moving on to his quest (for the foundations in logic), struggling with monsters (a streak of mental illness in his family, also found frequently in his colleagues), and, as in the real world, coming to an end that is both happy and sad, depending on how one views it, but certainly complex. It’s because of Russell and his colleague’s heroic narrative that Doxiadis thought to make the story in comic-book form, which works well. The art is clear and easy to read. while also embodying at times more than one level of meaning.

In the end, though, I didn’t find this to rise as high as some exemplars of the comic-book format, like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Persepolis/Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus/Maus II by Art Spiegelman. The story is good, the art is good, both together are better than either alone, yet somehow it never became far more than the sum of its parts, as the above titles did for me. Logicomix is entertaining, provocative, educational and very good, even as I felt it didn’t quite achieve the true greatness of its subjects.

The 1940 version of Gaslight, released in America under the title Angel Street, almost ceased to exist. When George Cukor remade it in 1946, MGM tried to have all copies of the earlier film destroyed. The remake, which starred Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten, was good, but I think I like the original more. It’s less stylized, which adds to its aura of menace. The film starts with the murder of an old woman, then years later a newly married couple move in. The husband, Anton Walbrook, is exasperated by his wife, played with trembling exactitude by Diana Wynyard. She fears she’s going mad, yet it’s he who is manufacturing evidence for it, as well as flirting with a manipulating housemaid and disappearing each night. This is a well-crafted suspense film, worth seeing especially if you enjoyed the remake.

I watched my first Disney princess movie with the boys when I took them to see The Princess and the Frog this weekend. But surprise–the heroine isn’t a princess! Tiana–the first African-American princess, about time!–is a hard-working girl from a poor family who is saving to open her own restaurant in New Orleans. The prince is a handsome twit, and some voodoo magic turns him into a frog. While some of the broad strokes are predictable (boy ends up with girl, bad guys are punished, etc.) several of the details are not, and those are what make it charming. My boys, 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy, loved it, and laughed throughout. They didn’t find the scary parts too scary, though my husband G. Grod and I had a hard time explaining where the bad guy went (he got dragged to hell by demons.)

Wondering: is Prince Naveen the hottest Disney prince? I think so.

It is fitting I haven’t gotten around to writing about my younger son, Guppy, turning 4 until more than a week after the fact. The celebration of his birthday stretched out over almost a week, starting with a play date. He’d told some of his preschool classmates they were invited to his party, but I wasn’t sure which ones. Then I couldn’t find a date or time that worked for a typical party, so I invited them all to join him at an open gym. I covered admission and bought a few dozen donut holes for this no-present, no-cake non-party, and it worked out pretty well. The kids who could come had fun, and (I hope) no one’s feelings were hurt.

We had a proper family dinner a few days before his birthday, with pizza and a bakery cake I customized with a toy monster truck and tire tracks. We had to have a quick dinner the day of, since G. Grod had a meeting that evening. Guppy asked for hot dogs, so I heated those, melted cheddar on the buns, cooked bacon to put on the buns, then served them alongside edamame and frozen tater tots, with ketchup, mustard, mayo, relish and Sriracha on the side. I put the plate in front of 6yo Drake and he said, “Wow, this is a fancy dinner, Mom!”

Finally, Guppy celebrated at his preschool, taking four turns around a pretend sun. All in all a good series of celebrations.

At four, Guppy is mostly past the very trying insanity of 3 1/2, where he would insist on impossible things then melt down when he didn’t get them. He still tries to exercise control over things he can, but he’s become a little more flexible and can almost grasp what a compromise is. He continues to drop the beginning ’s’ from words, so he’ll say he needs a “”poon” for ice cream, or that the chili is too “‘picy.” He calls a fox a “fots” as I did when a girl, and still has some trouble with letters G, K, R and L. Nonetheless, he makes himself understood.

We recently made the switch to a booster seat, so he’s now able to unbuckle himself, which is much more convenient than his 5-point toddler harness was. He has several friends, both in and out of preschool. His interests tend to follow those of 6yo brother Drake: race cars, comic books, and Ruff Ruffman. Guppy is quick with puzzles, and talented with those tiny Lego pieces; he’s very good at building and putting things together. He also likes to help me bake and cook, so he’s coming along nicely as my sous chef. His favorite book is Monkey with a Toolbelt and the Noisy Problem; I got him a signed copy for his birthday.

Mostly, he’s a good-natured, affectionate little boy with a ready smile who’s fun to be around. And when he’s not, I just have to wait a bit till he comes ’round again.

Like Jason Reitman’s last movie, Juno, Up in the Air manages to be both a big and little movie at the same time. It’s neither an indie nor a big-budget star vehicle, but rather a character-driven investigation of personal dreams, despair, and interpersonal connection. It draws no conclusions and provides no easy answers, or easily understood characters. Clooney is sexy and charming, but no more so than is the captivating Vera Farmiga. Kendrick does a fine job in the role of the snippy newbie, and J.K. Simmons stands out, as always, even in a small role. This is more superbly crafted and acted than the average indie, and is more thoughtful than the average big-budget film. It’s not perfect; in the end it can’t quite balance its themes of bitter and sweet. But its attempt to do so is admirable, and worth seeing.

At first glance, John Wray’s Lowboy looked like a run-of-the-mill YA novel–young mentally ill boy gets lost in NYC. It sounded rather like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Then I looked at the reviews, and looked again, because they were impressive–stars from both PW and Kirkus. As it was on The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books short list, and had a short wait at the library, I decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did; I’d have been sorry to miss this book.

Will Heller is a 16yo schizophrenic who has stopped taking his meds, and run away from his caretakers to ride the NYC subway.

He got on board the train and laughed. Signs and tells were all around him. The floor was shivering and ticking beneath his feet and the brick-tiled arches above the train beat the murmurings of the crowd into copper and aluminum foil. Every seat in the car had a person in it. Notes of music rang out as the doors closed behind him: C# first, then A. Sharp against both ears, like the tip of a pencil. He turned and pressed his face against the glass.

A detective, Ali Lateef, is tasked with finding Will, who is considered an SCM, or Special Category Missing. He meets with Will’s mother and tries to unravel why Will has run away, and more important, whether he’s a danger to himself or others. Chapters of Lateef and the mother in an intricate dance of information alternate with those of Will, nicknamed “Lowboy”, who is convinced that the overheating world is going to end in flames, and that only he and his actions can stop it.

This book is many things: psychological mystery, coming-of-age tale, and meditation on global warming are just a few. Initially, the comparison of Will to a famous NYC roaming schoolkid named Holden was most obvious to me. As the tale unraveled, though, I was put more in mind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov. This is a smart, scary, many-layered tale. I enjoyed and admire it a great deal.

I am FINALLY getting to The Morning News‘ 2010 Tournament of Books short list, after a spate of book group and book-group-book related reading. My hope is to read twelve of the sixteen*. There’s little possibility of me accomplishing all 12 by March 1, when the tourney begins. But darn it, I’m going to try.

First up was Wells Towers’ brief and devastating story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. No false advertising there; these are bleak, brutal stories. The central characters, young and old, male and female, are struggling to make meaning in their lives, even as any hope flickers and dies. Take the opening paragraph:

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He’d come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him–under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

The writing is spare and sharp, the characters easy to know, the humor dark and fleeting. If you’re looking for a brief, beautifully written collection of ugly stories, this is for you. If you’re feeling fragile? Best stay away.

*I hope to read:

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Lowboy, by John Wray

And am probably not going to try for these, as their descriptions and reviews don’t excite me:

Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter
Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie

My husband shared this post from Minimal with me. I like it a lot.

This week’s selection for Books and Bars, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, is a sci-fi classic. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards when it came out. The short story it grew out of was published in 1977, the same year Star Wars came to theaters. Card expanded the story to a novel, published in 1985. Ender, a nickname for Andrew, is not unlike Luke Skywalker, or any number of other mythical heroes whose story follows what Joseph Campbell called a monomyth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Ender’s Earth was attacked and almost destroyed twice within the last century by an alien race, called “buggers.” Since then, peace has existed among the countries. Children are monitored for excellence, and a very few are selected for the International Fleet’s battle school. Ender Wiggin is 6 years old. He’s a third child, a rarity, and something not allowed for most people on Earth. His parents were not only allowed, but encouraged to have a third child, after his older brother, Peter, proved a brilliant sociopath and his sister, Valentine, too pacifistic. In conversations between the military adults that preface each chapter, readers learn that Ender is a hoped-for synthesis of his siblings: brilliant and strong and empathic.

As Ender progresses through battle school, he is faced again and again with challenges, some of which are situational, and many of which are manufactured as the adults try to manipulate him into the military leader they hope him to be. Peter and Valentine, meanwhile, take on a challenge of their own when the fragile peace on Earth is threatened. They patiently and thoroughly build reputations for themselves online as political commentators known by the pseudonyms Locke (Peter) and Demosthenes (Valentine). Both siblings continue to affect Ender throughout his education. Peter is the violent killer Ender fears he has become, and Valentine is twice manipulated into urging Ender on in his training.

The book is a chilling meditation on the power adults have over children in the control of environment and information. It also ponders the relation between the military and the state, and what each person owes, or doesn’t, as a citizen. Ultimately, it wonders what it takes to be a killer, and whether killing is an inevitable result, whether out of fear, self-preservation or power. Card’s thorough and complex characterizations of Ender and his siblings, as well as the momentum created by a strong plot, make this an engrossing and provocative read for fans of science fiction and heroic myths, like the Harry Potter saga.

I am assured by fans of the series that the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, not only equals but surpasses and completes the saga begun in Ender’s Game. It, too, won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, the year after Ender’s Game did. There are several more books in the Ender tale, and some about other characters.

I thought everyone else would be watching the Super Bowl. But when I went to see The Hurt Locker at the Riverview, with a small tub of popcorn with real butter and a box of Junior Mints, there were plenty of other people in the theater with me. Alas, the normally stellar Riverview was having some trouble with the sound and the centering of the picture. The sound went buzzy, then unintelligible, just as the main character, played by Jeremy Renner, was introduced. They stopped, started, stopped and started the film again. The sound came back, but there was a chunk we missed. Ah, well, an excuse to see it again, which I’ll be glad to do.

The Hurt Locker is smart, gritty, and doesn’t hammer its themes home. It lets the viewer draw her own conclusions, and some of them are pretty shattering. Renner is excellent, as is the supporting cast, and there are a few cameos that had me saying, “Hey, it’s [so and so]!” Renner’s Will James is an Army detonation expert stationed in Iraq, and the tension that the director, Kathryn Bigelow, keeps up for the length of the film is impressive. Bigelow takes a tight, focused view on one soldier in a specific division, yet the work is probably one of the best on recent wartime; the themes are universal. Depressing, but real. And really, really good.

I recently read Nicole Krauss’ excellent The History of Love. It has a few surprises at the end that made me want to go back to the beginning and start all over again. So I did. I was again impressed by Krauss’ juggling of several narrators, all of which had distinct and believable voices. Additionally, there are echoes of experience among the characters that are fleeting, but serve to underline the themes of connectedness among people, and repetition in history.

Speaking of repetition, this time through I noted how the character of Leo Gursky, the old man, said the same thing many different ways:

“I made up everything” (8)

“sometimes I see things that aren’t there.” (26)

“my head is full of dreams.” (34)

“I told her–not the truth. A story not unlike the truth.” (86)

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.” (167)

“I chose to believe what was easier.” (168)

“who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?” (169)26)

“The truth is…” (226)

“I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe. So I tried. And I found I could. (228)

“I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.” (230)

“What if the things I believed were possible were impossible, and the things I believed impossible were possible?” (248)

As I wrote before, I highly recommend The History of Love.

I watched best-screenplay Oscar winner Juno again with my husband G. Grod, who hadn’t seen it, after we saw it on Roger Ebert’s Best Films of the Decade. I’m not sure I agree with Ebert on that, but it is a sweet little film.

Ellen Page is not quite believable as the smart-ass, suddenly pregnant Juno, but Michael Cera is adorable as the geeky boy/friend (this is before he played that role into the ground), Olivia Thirlby is a dream of a best friend, J.K. Simmons is an awesome dad, and Alison Janney is a stepmom for the ages. Even though Juno, both the movie and the character, is too clever by half, with some mouth-crowding unreal dialogue and a plot seized and claimed by anti-choice groups, it nonetheless charms and entertains.

Funny, sweet and a little bit sad, I was surprised to find the best element of the movie was Jennifer Garner’s moving and unshowy performance as the hopeful adopter of Juno’s child. According to imdb trivia:

Jennifer Garner dropped her A-list salary to a percentage point agreement for Juno when it was expected to be a small, low grossing indie film, but the decision paid off when Juno became a breakout smash at the box office - giving Garner her best payday yet.

I did, though, want Garner to unpuff her lips and eat a sandwich or two.

Last weekend I tried to see Avatar, but it was sold out. Instead I saw Crazy Heart, and I wasn’t disappointed. Jeff Bridges is a drunk, has-been country singer who once played to stadiums and now gets booked to bowling alleys. When he’s interviewed by a pretty young journalist, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, they both see something in the other. Though what she sees in him, with his aging skin puffy with drink and his breath undoubtedly reeking of cigarettes, is more of a stretch than what he sees in her. The love scenes feel a bit creepy because of this, but maybe they’re supposed to. Also, look at all the rock star/supermodel pairings.

The movie covers no new ground; it’s a mash-up of two recent Oscar-bait films, The Wrestler and Walk the Line. It’s not happiness sucking and soul crushing, as I found The Wrestler, though. Instead, like Walk the Line, it’s got a charismatic lead character played well by the actor, supported ably by the female lead and actress, with good music, well performed.

In “When Bad Movies Happen to Good Actors,” Lisa Schwartzbaum from Entertainment Weekly notes why good performances are more likely to get awarded when they’re in good movies,

while acting is a combination of skill and art, an award-worthy performance is an amalgam of science, technology, and luck. And finally, what you think of as a great performance has as much to do with how much you enjoy the whole movie experience – the plot, the music, the quality of the snacks, the smell of the moviegoer to your right – as it does with one actor’s ability to cry and another’s to kickbox or crack eggs. Yes, they’re only movies, but sometimes everything works.

I think Crazy Heart is an example of a solid, well-done movie for which both Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal deserve Oscar nominations. Heck, even Colin Farrell is good in it, as a southern country star!

At NPR’s Monkey See, Joe Reid agrees and counts it among the five non-best-picture nominees that you should see anyway, because of its “strong performances and beautiful music.”

I initially heard about Chop Shop in an article by A.O. Scott, a film reviewer for the New York Times, on the new style of real-life movies, which he termed neo-neo realism:

Chop Shop….seems at once utterly naturalistic and meticulously composed. The main characters are Ale (short for Alejandro), an energetic 12-year-old, and his older sister, Izzy (short for Isamar), who comes to stay with him in his makeshift quarters above the car-repair shop where he does odd jobs. There is no back story – no flashbacks or conversations about how they arrived at this state of virtual orphanhood in the shadow of Shea Stadium – and, at first, only the whisper of a plot.

I more recently read Roger Ebert’s list of the best films of the decade, which includes Chop Shop, and the best films of 2009, which includes Goodbye, Solo, also directed by Ramin Bahrani. Ebert notes that all three of his films, which also include Man Push Cart, are well worth viewing. Since I find Ebert and Scott mostly reliable, I thought it was time to seek one out, and I started with the earliest, 2007’s Chop Shop.

Chop Shop is a beautifully shot, meditative (i.e. not fast-paced) film. Ale and his sister are sweet and heartbreaking. Yet the film isn’t dragged down by irony or bitterness. Instead it’s buoyed, not exactly by hope, but by a kind of philosophical shrug that life goes on, and there are pretty good things in it even among the junk. Recommended, if you’re in the mood for a small, well-crafted indie film.

My husband G. Grod recommended Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to me several years ago. M, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, read it within the past year or so (ha! in 2005, actually. I have a long memory, I guess.) and recommended it, then a review at Semicolon intrigued me, so it crept up my to-read list. After my recent reading and appreciating of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, I moved it to the top of the list. (Bonus for us book geeks–it’s a shelf sitter, so I’m reading a book from home, rather than a new purchase or one from the library.)

The book opens in the 26th or 27th century. A novice monk, Brother Francis, is doing a Lenten hermitage in the desert, when he encounters a wanderer, and then comes across an archeologic find from before the Flame Deluge that took place in the 20th century. Francis’ order is of Leibowitz, a 20th century scientist and martyr whom they’re trying to have canonized. The book is divided into three sections, which I won’t detail as it might spoil an event I found truly shocking and moving. But the central question is whether history must repeat itself:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne, and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America–burned into the oblivion of the centures. And again and again and again. (245)

This is a satire of Catholicism, while making the monks and abbots of Leibowitz sympathetic, conflicted and complicated. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, as well as a theological and philosophical one. I’m off to review the legend of the “wandering Jew,” which might have enriched my reading experience if I’d had it in my mind from the beginning. This book made me feel, made me think, and continues to make me think. While we’re fortunate to have avoided a nuclear war in the 20th century, this novel retains a timeless quality as the threat remains, still, and other questions, like the ethics of euthanasia and the dangers and benefits of progress, remain relevant today.

I’d been meaning to read Nicole Krauss’ History of Love for a while; some trusted friends like Duff had recommended it; that’s her lovely photo above. So when it was a choice for the Twin Cities’ book group Books and Bars, I decided to give it a go. I started a copy I got from the library, but wasn’t able to finish by the time it was due; no renewals were allowed, as it had a wait list. So I bought a copy, and am glad I did. The History of Love is not long, but it’s deep and complex, and I can’t wait to read it again.

The book begins in the voice of Leo Gursky, an elderly Holocaust survivor afraid of dying unnoticed in New York City. He devises behavioral schemes to make himself noticed–spills things in stores, talks in movies, falls down on the street. Krauss swiftly and skillfully makes an annoying person a sympathetic one. Leo is funny, and he’s a writer. He also has a complicated history of love. He loved a woman once, but she went to America and married another.

Leo’s sections alternate mostly with those of Alma, a young Jewish girl whose mother is a translator of books, and whose father died early in her childhood. Alma writes notes to herself disguised as a survival notebook, and she has a fragile relationship with her brother Bird, who thinks he is a lamed vovnik, one of 36 chosen ones on Earth.

Bird gets a section, and the fictional book by the character Zvi Litvinoff, History of Love, gets a few, too. Yet the changes in voice and setting were never confusing, though I can’t say that about the book as a whole. The obfuscation is deliberate, though, as boundaries and stories are blurred and mixed. Events build momentum to a powerful conclusion, one that made me want to turn back and begin all over again. That this thought made me happy to do so, and that I think I’ll do so after I finish my current book, is a mark of how highly I admire and enjoyed The History of Love. Krauss’ husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, is the more famous novelist, but I wonder if Krauss might be the more skilled. This book made me think and feel, as well as go off in search of more information. Highly recommended.