The chief joy of the book is the tender portrayal of Leon Gursky, an elderly man living alone with his memories in New York City. A refugee from Nazi Poland (or perhaps Russia – the national boundaries kept changing), he was once a boy who “wished to be larger than life” but became a man “who survived by becoming invisible.” Invisibility saved him from the Nazis, but his life has thrown up other kinds of invisibility: the working man invisible in his ordinariness; the unmarried man invisible to the child he fathered but was separated from by fate; the man with no family or roots since his past was destroyed in the Holocaust; the writer who has written a great book which he left behind in Poland in the care of a friend; and lastly, the most difficult invisibility of all, that of old age.

Leon has one great fear:

“All I want is not to die on a day when I was unseen.”

To that end, he creates commotions in shops (the one in the shoe shop is a classic), so that he will be noticed, and he carries a card with his funeral instructions on it, in case he should die unexpectedly. His efforts to be seen are both poignant and funny, an irresistible mixture.

Alma Singer is the next in the cast of eccentric characters, a precocious young teenager with an interest in anthropology, botany, survival in the wilds, and an obsession with making lists in her efforts to understand the world and the people in her life. Her odd tastes are explained by the death of her father: these were his areas of expertise and all she has left of him. Her lists of facts about people soon turn out to be no help in knowing them at all. Her connection with Leon is that she was named after the girl in ‘The History Of Love’, a book which played a great part in the romance between her parents:

“This is the book I would have written for you if I could write”

’ her father inscribed on the book when he gave it to his wife. Alma has two aims in life: to find her mother a new husband because she has suspended her life to keep alive the love for her dead husband, and to trace Litvinoff, the putative author of the History. Little is known of Litvinoff, and Alma’s ’s detective work is a wildly funny satire on literary biographers, as she is manages only to draw up a list of things NOT known about this author, which hardly matters as he was not the author in the first place. Litvinoff had the same idea as Alma’s father, but took it a stage further: so entranced was he by the book, and so in love with his wife, that he rewrote it, changing names and places to fit their love story.

Alma’s untangling of the history of The History, and Leon’s attempts to make contact with his long lost son and to find out what happened to his book (and another manuscript of his which ends up attributed to someone else) are the mainsprings of the story. The plot in places is stretched to squeaking point (Fate keeps intervening) and almost snaps when Alma’s brother interferes with her detective work with a very stagey Comedy of Misunderstandings, and yet somehow enjoyment of the book is not impaired. The point is clear: the importance of a book lies in its sharing of a significant experience with readers; it lies in its capacity to express for others what they are unable to articulate for themselves; and in the need for important things to be communicated:

“You stopped writing. I thought you were dead”

the original Alma says to Leon when they are temporarily reunited after the war. In Leon’s obituary of Isaac Babel, silence again is equated with death:

“The richness of silence was really the poverty of not being heard.”

The History is peppered with references to the dead of the Holocaust, who live only in people’s memories and will never be heard again. Scraps of them are hoarded by those who loved them, ”things that happened and things that didn’t” as Leon puts it, just as Alma hoards the bits and pieces of information she recalls about her father and what she discovers about Litvinoff and Gursky.

In the end, there is some resolution of the literary mystery, a resolution as comic and touching as the rest of the events of the book. But it is Love’s triumph which matters most: confused and difficult and confusing Love may be; it may make you make you tongue tied and miserable or ecstatic and somehow consoled in the face of horrors, or all of these things simultaneously, but it shines in the lives of those who experience it.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.