Discovering Columbus

Smith, David Bruce

Discovering Columbus A Guide for the Perplexed Jonathan Levi Random House, 1992 342 pp , S20.00 Reviewed by David Bruce Smith Vague knowledge or unreliable tales often shroud a person in...

...Perplexed has the tension of a long psychotherapy session, but its revelations are upstaged by fancy, buzzword prose...
...The explorer remains romanticized, loved, loathed and enduring: a legend...
...Accidentally, the women meet and talk—for 24 hours—at Sandor's villa...
...When remembered posthumously, a brilliant life or a glamorous death can be misconstrued, transformed from fact to legend...
...He may also have been the first European to arrive in North America...
...A missionary or a mercenary...
...the reader "listens" to them but feels like a snoop...
...Coincidences and mutual deja vu experiences abound: Holland and Hanni learn that they are related...
...Regardless of that complication, the unmasked Esau Letter and their latently exposed sisterhood compels the women to unfold their difficult lives and ascend as developed characters...
...Jonathan Levi's debut novel, A Guide for Ihe Perplexed, examines some of these possibilities and trifles with new ones...
...Esau emerges as Columbus' indispensable friend, a secret navigator, sole survivor of his 10 chosen Jewish men, and the intended father of the Jewish haven...
...Columbus' New World expedition was financed mostly by Jewish families, but Levi suggests that the explorer may have sailed with a minyan, hoping—in part—to discover a refuge for Spain's expelled Inquisition Jewry...
...The women are stranded in Mariposa, Spain, because of an airport strike...
...the Esau Letter reappears...
...Presented as letters written by two women who share a travel agent but are strangers to one another, Perplexed is innovative in format, dexterously crossbreeding truth and legend...
...Unfortunately, the cumulative read is not satisfying...
...A gentleman or a rapist...
...For example: Was he a bombastic Catholic or a kashrut Jew...
...Hanni, a 65-year-old widow from Miami who is a descendant of Maimonides, is searching for a valuable 1506 family document called the Esau Letter...
...Christopher Columbus, even after 500 years, is a veiled historical figure...
...Hanni is likable and sympathetic, but Levi constructs their tete-a-tete as if it is strictly private...
...Esau, another of Hanni's ancestors, sailed to America with Columbus as a stowaway...
...Holland is a six-foot androgynous British filmmaker completing a documentary about the violinist, Sandor...
...Discovering Columbus A Guide for the Perplexed Jonathan Levi Random House, 1992 342 pp , S20.00 Reviewed by David Bruce Smith Vague knowledge or unreliable tales often shroud a person in mystery...
...Oddly, Levi does not lift any of the gauze from around Columbus...
...and a member of moment's Board of Advisors...
...and Hanni reads it to Holland...
...Holland, fashioned without a first name, is caustic and man-hungry, but she suffices as Hanni's mother confessor...
...David Bruce Smith is a writer and real estate executive in Washington, D.C...
...At its simplest, his death left scattered many unknowns...

Vol. 18 • February 1993 • No. 1


 
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