The History of Love Themes

Love, you say? Well, duh—it's right there in the title. Even though every relationship in The History of Love ends poorly—separation, betrayal, misunderstandings, and death abound—we still co...

A teenaged sleuth, an octogenarian locksmith, a widowed book translator—what do these three have in common? They're all lonely and alone, for starters. And it's not only them—almost every chara...

Of the two main characters in The History of Love, one is an old man primarily looking back and the other is a teenage girl looking boldly forward. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that it's the...

The pallor of death hangs over The History of Love like… well, the Grim Reaper himself. We'll deal with grief in a minute, but first we have to talk about death. Leo spends most of his days fixat...

While Leo might be alone in his meditation on death, all the characters in The History of Love unite in their experiences of grief. Leo grieves for the loss of his beloved, the son he never knew, a...

The History of Love is a book about… a book, so you'd better believe literature is going to be important here. It explores the ways in which literature manages to both unite and divide, connect...

"Daddy issues"—there, we said it. While there are certainly other family dynamics in The History of Love—sibling rivalries, the adoption of a stepchild, single motherhood—the relationship bet...

Issues of language and communication come up in a number of contexts in The History of Love. Then again, this comes as no surprise, given all the reading and writing going on (see the "Literature-W...

For most of The History of Love, religion waits patiently on the sidelines. While it's of course significant that most of the characters in the novel are Jewish, Judaism itself—as a religion—is...

On one level, the theme of "The Home" once again points back to issues of "Identity" and "Family." But it can also be considered in its most literal sense—how the physical places where the charac...