"Stylish and inventive...Levi...writes with a Saul Bellow-like braininess and brashness while also bearing the mark of such fabulists as Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez...delightfully readable...vigorous, vivid, and grounded in the pleasures of the senses."

Newsday

"Seriously funny, beguilingly ambitious...calls to mind the fanciful storytelling flights of Cynthia Ozick and John Barth, the outrageous satire of Monty Python, and the globetrotting of Vanity Fair...a fabulously complicated tale of travel, exile and renewal."

Washington Post Book World

"A fable of fantastical lushness, reminiscent of the best fairy tales."

The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed, this extraordinary first novel uses magic realism and travelers' tales to achieve a startlingly unique revisionist history of the discovery of America. Like a Chagall painting, Levi's novel weaves together Jewish folk tales, dreams, violins, flamenco, and even Led Zeppelin into a rich, constantly evolving tapestry. Two women--Holland, a documentary filmmaker, and Hanni, who is searching for an ancient family letter--are stranded overnight in Spain. Holland and Hanni find a connection in the same mysterious travel agent, Ben, and in young Isabella, who might be Holland's daughter and Hanni's granddaughter. As Hanni's successfully located letter is read aloud, it reveals the history of the Jewish people, ending with their expulsion from Spain and the discovery of America by Esau, Hanni's ancestor. It may all be a grand cosmic joke engineered by Ben, but Levi, a cofounder of Granta, has accomplished a stunning tour de force that shouldn't be missed."

Library Journal

"Levi's audacious debut rings changes on a variety of intellectual themes while chronicling the friendship of two women, both visitors in Spain, who discover their common bonds."

Publisher's Weekly

Dear Reader,
You are traveling, you are perplexed.  You want to know.

Brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed, this extraordinary first novel uses magic realism and travelers’ tales to achieve a startlingly unique revisionist history of the discovery of America. Like a Chagall painting, Levi’s novel weaves together Jewish folk tales, dreams, violins, flamenco, and even Led Zeppelin into a rich, constantly evolving tapestry. Two women–Holland, a documentary filmmaker, and Hanni, who is searching for an ancient family letter–are stranded overnight in Spain. Holland and Hanni find a connection in the same mysterious travel agent, Ben, and in young Isabella, who might be Holland’s daughter and Hanni’s granddaughter. As Hanni’s successfully located letter is read aloud, it reveals the history of the Jewish people, ending with their expulsion from Spain and the discovery of America by Esau, Hanni’s ancestor. It may all be a grand cosmic joke engineered by Ben, but Levi, a cofounder of Granta, has accomplished a stunning tour de force that shouldn’t be missed.
Library Journal

GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

 

 

Pub Date
1993/Re-issued 2017

 

ABOUT

The setting is Mariposa, a bewitched Spanish town where three stranded women search for a mysterious man and pass the time by telling each other stories–stories that voyage to the Egypt of Moses Maimonides, Torquemada’s Spain, and Hitler’s Germany–not to mention a New World encountered simultaneously by Christopher Columbus and a group of Jewish stowaways.  Intermingling the medieval and the modern, stories of war and lost loves, lost children, lost Jews, the healing power of music, and the true origins of baseball, A Guide for the Perplexed combines the romantic erudition of Umberto and A.S. Byatt with the ingenious storytelling of Scheherazade and A Thousand and One Nights.

Available at Amazon