Moses Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed in 1190. Eight hundred 800 years later, Jonathan Levi wrote A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novel, loosely based on the original text with some fantastical alternative history.
What starts out as a simple travel saga quickly divides and multiplies into histories of World War II, the Spanish Inquisition, the discovery of the New World, the founding of Florida, and the origin of baseball, as well as lost loves, lost children, lost tribes, and lost Jews.
Through it all, a familial connection to Maimonides and some lost family letters tie all the diaspora and disparate stories together like the red stitches of a baseball.
It’s one of those true rollercoaster books. You start reading and it starts going up, and then at some point, you just let go and let Levi take you from time to time and from tale to tale through a loosely connected palace of dreams.
It is a book about many things, and what it will be about for you will depend on you. Like many like it, this book reflects the reader back at themselves. For example, these are some of my favorite passages:
“So Maimonides, in the bumbling way of all devoted fathers-in-law, sat down to write a letter and stood up, having written a book”
“When you’re immortal, it’s just one mid-life crisis after another.”
“But you are obsessed with knowledge, with an unfillable desire to know, to learn. You search out new experiences, feast greedily on new books, new maps, new ideas. You are always ready to listen, because you are always ready to change your mind. You draw exquisitely, Esau, because you know how to erase.”
“Judaism, Christianity, Islam, survive because of metaphor, because of story. They survive because wise men are able to recognize parables, arguments, theories, intangible lessons, in the tales of these warm scriptural actors.”
“True flamenco thrives only under fascism–the Spanish Jews before the Expulsion, the gypsies up to the death of Franco, American rock through Watergate. Forget about anything after that.”
“Perhaps Hassan the Palestinian academic was right, all those years ago in Paris at the Battle of Trocadéro. It takes a balanced mixture of Catholic brandy, Jewish pastry, and Islamic coffee to achieve intestinal harmony.”
These passages and this book are not inherently religious. They do, though, invoke religion and belief, but more as a tether to morality, knowledge, and experience, than dogma.
It is this reason that those six passages spoke to me.
My own beliefs are cobbled together from experience, knowledge, and dialogue, much like this book. It’s something that my wife picked up after I finished reading, and I’m glad she did. It’s a book that defies your logic, weaving stories and characters in ways you weren’t expecting that ends up with you thinking that was the way it was always supposed to be, no matter how odd.
I’m being a bit coy and unforgiving in the real explanation of the book. That’s because if any of this intrigues your interest, then just find a copy of Jonathan Levi’s A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novel for yourself.