ESSAY CEMETERY

A Spoon Full of Fiction: Imagination as Mitigator in The History(s) of Love Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love is filled with grave themes of societal and personal trauma. Its protagonists have experienced varieties of losses: Leopold Gursky is a holocaust survivor who has lost his mother and siblings, the love of his life, and his child to the Holocaust; Alma and Bird Singer have lost their father to cancer and their mother to grief. Despite these sober subjects, The History of Love is written with whimsy, wonder, and imagination. Through the original Alma, Gursky's lover, Nicole Krauss proposes her own literary aesthetic. Her ideas of literature are reflected both in the History of Love as well as the book-within-a-book of the same title. Writing is central to Leo's life. Alma, his beloved, is central in shaping his literary style. His first attempt at a novel results in a heavily realistic work, too realistic for Alma's taste. When he showed it to he

The story is told in the first person by a woman who is married to a man named John. Her husband on the other hand is a physician and does not believe in the supernatural. Also, she is sick and he doesn't believe her about that either. He thinks she should rest and not write even though she feels it would do her good. She feels he is loving but restricting. They have rented a colonial mansion for the summer. The narrator is suspicious that there may be something supernatural about the mansion because they rented it so cheaply. There was legal trouble concerning heirs but she doesn't know more than that. The house and the grounds are beautiful although they have fallen into slight disrepair. The room she and John are staying in is in depressing shape, including grotesquely peeling yellowed wallpaper and the narrator is severely bothered by it. John is away all day on physician duty. He remains blind to her suffering and insists the mansion is doing her good, as do the

Jackson, Rosemary. "Chapter 2: The Fantastic as a Mode."  Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion . London: Methuen, 1986. 13-60. Print. Fantasy is a genre which is hard to classify. Critics use the term to signify any literature which is not realistic, or possible in our world, including but not restricted to allegory, horror stories and myths. As a genre, fantasy breaks a lot of conventions of realistic literature. Space, time, philosophies, ideologies are all different. Language and syntax are also changed. Fantasy deals with existential issues through this breaking of conventions. Fantasy spans all themes, including erotic, criminal, psychological and macabre. Fantasy also breaks conventions of character, and many times characters within fantasy have multiple identities. According to Sartre the function of fantasy changed with the shift of society from religion to secularity. In the religious tradition fantasy was a form of escapism, but in secular society fan