Tides of Treacle 
James Wood
- The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Last year, when the young writer Nicole Krauss published an extract from her second novel in the New Yorker, I took delighted note. The voice of her elderly narrator was both familiar and strange enough to be captivating. Leopold Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish immigrant from Poland, told us about his solitary, death-haunted life in Manhattan. He tries to be seen by someone at least once every day (‘All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen’); he and his upstairs neighbour, Bruno, communicate by banging on their radiator pipes; he carries with him a card that reads: ‘MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.’
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James Wood’s most recent book is How Fiction Works. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
James Wood writes about the manipulations of Ian McEwan · The Manipulations of Ian McEwan
The Lie-World · D.B.C. Pierre
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Fundamentally Goyish · Zadie Smith
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
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