Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When they write my obituary.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

by 2 Comments

This is a really competent novel that has at its center a really fragile heart. I have always been wary of this book (it came out about 15 years ago), because I don’t really like the description of it, and I don’t think that it quite is what it says it is, and because of the title. The title refers to a novel written and published in Spanish by a Jewish writer of Argentine  and European descent. The novel also happens to be a novel […]

Remove head from sphincter, then write.

by 4 Comments

I almost wish I actually hated this book because then I could summon enough vitriol to fill a full 250-word review. As it stands, all I really got is ” … meh”. I kind of wish I’d done CBR last year just so y’all could have been treated to my screed on My Absolute Darling but nope, you guys are stuck with this much masquerading as a philosophical journey. It’s a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer. She’s so far up her own […]

“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

by 4 Comments

I read this book when it was first published and I was recently out of high school. It appealed, very much, to the dramatic teenager in me, who thought there was nothing more romantic than the tragic love of Moulin Rouge and whose own high school relationship was characterized by high highs and low lows. It’s not that The History of Love is, itself, histrionic, but Nicole Krauss does employ a very dreamy, lyrical style of prose that expresses romance intrinsically, bursting out from the […]

“And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it.”

by 4 Comments

For the first half of this novel, I was not expecting it to finish as something I would rate with 4 stars. It took a while to get started, but once it did — I was in love. I have a feeling that if I were to reread it again, I would love it even more. “We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.” The History of Love is […]



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