Plotstormers Breakdown: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

See how The History of Love by Nicole Krauss squares up against Plotstormers and the Magical Sixteen Point Plan Of Your Dreams.

Warning team: this is one big spoiler. There’s a few twists and turns in this book so if you don’t want to ruin the surprise, go read it first and then come back for this shakedown.

The History of Love is an intricate, weaving story about the search for identity and meaning when, for generations, identity and meaning has been twisted and brutalised by violence and oppression.

It is a story of “Holocaust inheritance”, that is, what happens to the children of the children of the victims, what we do with the sense of catastrophic loss and pain and a longing for a thing that can never quite be named. The Shoah was unique, as are all genocides. But genocides are alarmingly common in humanity’s repertoire of behaviours, both past and present, which gives the destruction of families and communities and the search for belonging a heart-crushing sense of universality that crosses cultures and catastrophes. 

This is also a story about the way memory works, with characters whose desperate attempts to simply live are constantly interrupted by the past via memories that emerge like tiny bubbles of water before they suddenly fill the whole view and we realise that the characters we are following are nothing but memory, nothing but the events that led them to this point, that no matter how much they try to claim their lives in the now, they are trapped in the air pockets of history, of trauma, of the matryoshka dolls of inheritance; what your mother did, what your father did, what their parents did, what was done to them and in turn what they did to you. As lives are fragmented, so too are memories, history, reality and the future, and we find ourselves in a strange world where everything is doubled and nothing is quite what we think – there are two characters called Alma, two manuscripts, an author with two names, friends who are both alive and dead, fractured lives across time and continents. 

In a way, this is a story of stories. Not just the story of how a book passed down through generations has the power to transform the lives it touches, but about the way the story world interacts with the real world – the cyclical passing of real life events to stories, from stories to real life events and back round again in a never ending cycle of what we see, what we say, what we do, who we are. 

All of which makes the way it’s structured extremely interesting, flicking between three different timelines, with each timeline shaken up by further slips of memory and chronology.

Author Nicole Krauss has said in interviews that she didn’t plan this book, that it came free flow and she simply wrote the story as she imagined it. It’s a complex, braided, time-jumping story full of loops and arcs and twists that come together with an unfathomable finesse. A story that plays with form with a lightness and ease that means when we actually compare it to the Plotstormers’ 16 point plan it’s a huge surprise that it’s fits with an almost complete one-to-one likeness.

Let’s take a look…

The Four Point Plan

1. Leo Gursky is waiting for death and mourning the loss of his true love, Alma Meriminski. Alma Singer is trying to start her life but is mourning the loss of her father.

2. Leo sends a manuscript of a book he wrote to his long lost son. He discovers his son has died and tries to break into his house to get his manuscript back. Alma Singer goes on a journey around New York trying to find the Alma she was named after from a book called The History of Love.

3. Leo discovers his manuscript is published under his late son’s name. Alma, via her brother Bird who thinks he is the messiah, learns that Leo Gursky is the true author of The History of Love and sets off to meet him.

4. Leo and Alma finally meet. Leo dies happy, and Alma understands where she comes from.

The Seven Point Plan

1. Leo Gursky is waiting for death and mourning the loss of his true love, desperate to be truly seen before he dies. Alma Singer is trying to start her life but is mourning the loss of her father, desperate to find how who she is and where she comes from.

2. Leo sends his long lost son a manuscript of a story he has written called Words for Everything. Alma tries to get her mother romantically involved with an man called Jacob Marcus, who has asked her mother to translate The History of Love from Spanish to English.

3. Leo is finally happy but then he discovers his son died, so he decides to crash his funeral. Pretending to be her mother, Alma corresponds with Jacob Marcus and realises she needs to search for the Alma she was named after (the one written about in The History of Love).

4. Through flashbacks we discover that Leo’s book, The History of Love, was published by his friend who thought Leo was killed during WWII. Leo breaks into his son’s house to get the manuscript back but has no luck. Alma has no luck finding the original Alma, she thinks her mother will never find love, her brother thinks he’s the messiah, and she can’t bring herself to speak to the boy she’s in love with.

5. Leo then discovers that his book Words for Everything was published under his son’s name and it brings him great joy – that means his son maybe knew of his existence. Alma’s hunting leads her to Leo’s son’s house and she leaves a note, but then discovers he died. She finally breaks down and cries on her mother, saying that she needs her.

6. Alma’s brother, in his efforts to do a good dead and prove he’s the messiah, digs around and puts the final pieces of the puzzle together. He messages Leo and Alma separately to meet at the bench in the park.

7. Leo finally finds Alma and is truly seen, and Alma finally understands where she comes from.

The Sixteen Point Plan

1. The hook

Leo Gursky is waiting for death but he’s terrified of dying on a day he isn’t seen by another human, so he goes out in public and makes a lot of fuss. He remembers his true love, a woman called Alma Meriminski, and how they were separated during World War II. He remembers arriving in America from Poland after three years of hiding from the Nazis, and he remembers the book he wrote, The History of Love. On arriving in America, he immediately tracks down Alma M, who he discovers had his child but had to marry someone else and is now pregnant again. In the present, he has written a new book called Words for Everything, and he sends it to his long lost son, Isaac.

2. The denial

Alma Singer is named after every girl in the novel The History Of Love. She is mourning the loss of her father and trying to figure out who she is. Her mother is offered some work translating a Spanish version of The History of Love written by Zvi Litvinoff (waaat?!), but Alma intercepts the correspondence and tries to make her mother and the client fall in love. In the meantime, Alma’s brother Bird thinks he’s the messiah and tries to do good deeds, but instead breaks his wrist and drives Alma mad. Alma feels as though everything is stopping her from starting her life.

3.  Set up

Zvi Litvinoff meets Rosa outside a cafe in Chile and they start dating. When they become serious, Litvinoff began reading her excerpts from The History of Love, a book he says he has written in Yiddish. She helps him translate it into Spanish and the original Yiddish version is destroyed when their house is flooded.

4. Crisis point

Leo is desperate to hear from his son but also suddenly feels happy, until he sees in the newspaper that Isaac, a famous author, has died. Leo decides to go to his funeral and when Isaac’s half-brother Bernard starts talking to him he panics and pretends he can only speak Yiddish. At the wake, Leo sees a photo of his Alma, who we discover died five years previously. Bernard starts to explain the photo but Leo already knows everything about when it was taken. He cries and steals the picture. He goes home to find all his furniture overturned and a manuscript under his pillow. It’s a copy of The History of Love.

5.  A threshold

Alma Singer meets her Russian pen pal Misha who has moved to Brooklyn and she explains about The History of Love and the man she is corresponding with in place of her mother. She tries to figure out why he wants this book translated so badly. Alma thinks about her parents’ love story and asks her mother about the Alma from the book. She finds out her surname is Meriminksi and decides she has to find that Alma.

6. A subplot

Litvinoff is old and sick now, probably dying, and desperately wants to tell his wife something, but we don’t know what. He remembers the last time he saw his unnamed friend, and that he was holding The History of Love in Yiddish that day. Then he remembers a time before that when his friend was very sick and he went to nurse him, and found a lot of obituaries on the friends’ desk, including one titled The Death of Leo Gursky.

7. Action!

Leo reads the manuscript and is confused. It’s The History of Love. It’s in English but all the Polish names are now Spanish. He drops the papers all over his flat. He remembers his time working as a locksmith and how he broke into Carnegie Hall, imagining Alma alongside him. He wonders if he’s a world famous author without knowing it but discovers he isn’t, and then his best friend Bruno encourages Leo to get his manuscript back from Isaac’s.

8. Midpoint

Alma’s uncle comes to stay and asks Alma what she wants to do when she grows up. Alma has no idea. Alma begins searching for other Alma. Pen pal Misha is doubtful that other Alma is real and if she is he thinks it’s unlikely she is in New York. Alma and Misha like each other, but their first kiss is a disaster and Alma runs off, saying she’s into someone else. She goes to the city archives hunting for other Alma and realises that she might have married and changed her name. Bird has built an arc and when it starts raining he says “it’s starting”.

9. Terrible times

Litvanoff leaves Poland with the manuscript his friend gave him, which is to be kept for Leopold Gursky. He makes a solitary life in Chile while listening to the news in Europe on the radio. When the war ends, he learns everyone is dead. He takes the envelope off the manuscript, which has Leo’s name on it, and burns it.

10. Pinch point

Leo and Bruno get the train to Isaac’s house, but Bruno misses it on purpose and Leo is alone. He remembers times over the years where he watched Isaac from a distance and once got a letter from Alma, admitting she still loves him and wishes Isaac knew the truth. He picks the locks at his late son’s house, sees a note on the window and throws it away, looks for his manuscript, desperate for proof his son knew he existed. He finds nothing and leaves.

11. All is lost

Alma quizzes her mum about other Alma and gets some more details. She goes back to the archives and is then sent to the City Clerk’s Office where she finally finds her Alma. She invents a whole fantasy about finding other Alma, telling her about her mother and father’s love story, about how she came to be named Alma, but when she gets to the address, the doorman tells her other Alma died five years ago. She asks him if he’s ever heard of The History of Love and he says to speak to other Alma’s son Isaac, who is a famous writer.

Later she discovers her mother sent more translated chapters to Jacob Marcus before Alma had a chance to intercept and include her love letters. She feels hopeless and lost.

12. Navel gazing

Litvinoff starts copying the Yiddish manuscript into Spanish. He buries the Yiddish manuscript in the garden but his guilt is so great the next spring he digs it up and puts it under the sink. At the publishers, we discover that Litvinoff has added The Death of Leo Gursky to the end of the manuscript.

On his death bed he tries to confess to his wife that he didn’t write the book, but he is unable to. Instead we find out that not long after the book was published in Spanish, they received a letter from Leo Gursky saying he was alive and asking for his manuscript back. Rosa destroyed the letter and manufactured the flood that destroyed the Yiddish manuscript. She writes back saying Litvinoff is too ill to reply but the manuscript was destroyed.

13. Fly headlong into the third act

It’s Alma’s 15^th birthday and it’s still raining. Alma goes to the library and finds an Isaac Moritz book. The protagonist is called Jacob Marcus, the same name as the man who wanted the Spanish version of The History of Love translated. She gets a classmate to drive her to Isaac Moritz’s house. He’s not there so she leaves a note taped to the window. A week later she reads his obituary and she collapses on her mother saying that she needs her.

14. Slay some bad guys

Bird tries to get to Israel because he thinks he’s the messiah, but fails. The fire dept take down the ark he’s been building. It stops raining.

Bird worries he has disappointed God and is scared that things are bad because of that, so he decides to do a nice thing for someone and that will make everything better. 

15. Kill the big boss

Bruno tells Leo that he’s in a magazine. Leo reads it and it’s a story called Words for Everything, written by Isaac Moritz, and the protagonist is called Leo Gursky.

Leo calls the mag who says it’s from Isaac’s final novel, and Leo suddenly finds great joy in realising that there was a brief moment when Leo and Isaac knew of each other’s existence.

He the finds a note from someone called Alma, asking to meet in Central Park. It reads “I think you know who I am”.

16. Wrap it up

Bird snoops in Alma’s notebook trying to figure out what she’s been looking for. While Bird is snooping, Bernard calls asking for Alma, because she left a note on Isaac’s door. Bernard had been with Isaac at he hospital, and before he died told Bernard he knew their father wasn’t his father and was instead the author of The History of Love. Bird says it’s Zvi Litvanoff and Bernard says no it’s Leopold Gursky.

Bird prints off his mother’s translation, puts it in a brown envelope, writes Leo’s name on it and heads to Leo’s apartment. Alma then gets a letter telling her to meet Leo on a bench in the park.

In the park, Leo is delirious, thinking he’s about to meet an angel, or about to die, and remembering all the moments in his life that got him to this point.

Alma stands in front of him and says she was named after every girl in The History of Love. Leo says he wrote that book.

We also discover that Bruno died in 1941 and that Leo still spoke to him every day so he wasn’t lonely.

Leo and Alma hug. Leo is finally truly seen, and Alma discovers where she is from.

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By: SarahWHQ