The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

This week I posted about Nicole Krauss’s remarkable The History of Love, and there were too many beautiful passages to put in the review, but I couldn’t resist sharing them. Here’s a little bit of Love:

“Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. The collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.”

Having double-majored in English and History, I’m a sucker for writing about where the two intersect.

That is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it alive, not boxing t into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a little more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime its still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. . . . It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.

– Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only [...]