ESSAY CEMETERY

Summary Men make war, even though it injures them terribly. Paley asks: how do they come to live this way? When Paley was a little girl, she was a boy. She wanted to continue being a boy and to go to war and do other boy things, a notion that changed only experiencing WWII. She lived in Army camps with her husband much of the time, which she liked because of the boys and the action. As she began to live her own life as a writer and otherwise, she stopped wanting to be a boy; in fact, she thought it was the worst thing that she could never identify with. And after she had children she began to notice the women around her, to really live among women, and ascribe importance to them. She began rejecting the notion that men lived exciting compelling lives. She began to be interested in women.  This is how she came to write about women. She began to explore the female terrain with which she was unfamiliar through her stories. Even though she felt what she was writing was triv...

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...