A Guide for the Perplexed
Dara Horn's magnificent novel should be the next thing you read
I first encountered Dara Horn because of an article in The Atlantic that asked an interesting logic question: “if hatred comes from ignorance,” which we often assume it does, then “why were America’s best universities full of this very specific ignorance?” Meaning the hatred we call antisemitism. “And why, were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it?”
Not just “people,” but purportedly some of the smartest, most accomplished, most worldly and experienced — presumably “not ignorant” — people in the world. Why, the question remains, is Jew-hatred more common among the well-educated than the poorly educated?
The essay was thoughtful and helped change the way I see the world. And it made me curious about what else she’s written — and so I read the book she mentions in the article, which is titled People Love Dead Jews. This book is an excellent read: a remarkably succinct and forthright description of how antisemitism has moved thru the ages, a book which I’ve recommended before, here.
But more recently I’ve read one of her novels, and it’s my favorite thing of hers I’ve encountered so far, an absolutely majestic story that’s as much a thriller as a thinker, full of twists and turns, sexy scandal and scholarly debate: A Guide for the Perplexed.
This book is not THE Guide for the Perplexed; however, the author of THAT ancient text (12th Century physician Moses Maimonides) IS one of the characters in the novel, as is one Solomon Schechter, who existed in real life and did help excavate ancient Hebrew documents from a crumbling synagogue in Cairo in 1896 for Cambridge University. But the novel’s primary narrative concerns an American tech genius who builds an app that records all the details of a user’s life so that their past can live forever in a personally curated virtual museum, so that the little details you didn’t think were important enough to record get recorded anyway, and when you go to look for them, they’ll be there, AI-organized behind a “door” icon detailed with symbolic meaning — a little kid’s bedroom door for happy childhood memories, but a garden gate or glass doors or perhaps a locked prison grate, depending on what records you’re “remembering.”
The American creator of this marvelous app is wealthy and famous and a bit full of herself, and she goes to Cairo to contribute her expertise to the new library at Alexandria, where, after a tense week with her Egyptian interlocutor (who holds strong philosophical objections to the very idea of this app), she gets kidnapped by some people who don’t really know what they’re doing, and very quickly ends up dead!
But she lives on in Cairo’s City of the Dead, a vast region of above-ground crypts where Cairo’s poor and displaced live beside the sarcophagi of strangers. She’s become powerless, voiceless, helpless, and disconnected not just from her precious tech, but from the life she cared about, especially her husband and young daughter. She begins to wonder if using an app to preserve her memories made her brain less rigorous about remembering things on its own — without her app to remind her of her daughter’s face, what does the child look like?
But I haven’t even entered into what this book is really about, so if you’re intrigued (and you should be!) and you despise spoilers (fair!) this would be the place to stop reading and just go buy the book and dive in. If you keep reading, I will try to hold back on the juiciest turns. But this book is actually about siblings, and sibling rivalry, and sibling love, and sibling loss. Each of the main characters has an older sister, or a younger brother, or a twin brother, and it’s the divergent fates of the siblings that these stories are really about.
When tech-genius Josie disappears in Cairo, her sister, who’s never really felt like she had a place in the world, suddenly has a very defined and important role: her niece, her sister’s daughter, needs a mother, and she’s the closest thing there is. And, it turns out, she connects with this child in a way that no one, not even her mother did, because the child, like the sister, is not a super-genius like her mother, she’s weird and average, and a little embarrassing. But with her aunt now caring for her, the child thrives! And the aunt becomes close — yes, that close — to her brother-in-law, and she all but moves in, taking her sister’s place in the household as mother and lover, even tho she could never take her sister’s place in the tech or business world.
Schechter, the Cambridge University Scholar from the 19th Century, has an identical twin brother, who, after Schechter moved to England, also left their childhood home in Romania but to settle in Palestine. One dedicated himself to intellectual study, the other to building a practical every day life with his body and his hands. They spend their entire adult lives estranged, meeting again only after Schechter has concluded his dusty and exhausting excavations in Egypt. He visits his twin in Palestine expecting to see a reflection of his face, but in the setting of the golden holy land he imagined through his studies. Instead he finds a man who looks half his age, twice as healthy, and unaccountably happy. While Schechter is alone and driven, his brother delights in generations of family and a community subsisting on a dull brown work-in-progress.
Each brother remembers the same phrase coming out of their father’s mouth differently, and what it meant, differently. Each of them follows his father’s wisdom and ends up on other ends of the world. Two men who at one point shared the same face, who still share the same DNA, have nonetheless become two entirely different ideas of what life means.
Meanwhile, back in the 12th Century…
Yes, it’s that kind of book. These three stories (four really, since the story of Josie in Egypt and her sister in the US are mostly separate) intertwine marvelously and meaningfully, and all of them are high-stakes gambles for the people involved. All of them are weighing greater goods against specific pains, or the possibility of pain to a brother or sister. While one character might navigate the actual court of an actual sultan, another might need to navigate the “court” of the defacto “sultan” of the City of the Dead — but for both the matter is life and death. Schechter, who travels so far in search of knowledge, winds up destroying much of what he treasures in the act of recovering it, and compromises his health, and ultimately his entire sense of himself as a scholar.
In each set of siblings, one must necessarily be more fortunate than the other, but their fates are also tied, so that the fortune of one might harm the other, and the sacrifice of one might save the other, and who gets harmed and who gets saved, you do not know until the final page. Literally: the ending introduces a new possibility that was embedded in the logic of the story from the beginning, and yet manifests as a heart-stopping turn.
This novel is an absolute masterpiece: Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed. Read this book. It might be the best thing you read for a long, long time. I give it ALL the stars.
Will do