A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Dara Horn

Finished this book in three days, which is pretty amazing for me, with fiction, but this well written novel held my attention.

I finished reading A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Dara Horn, and do not find it recorded here.  Software Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do.  When she visits the Library of Alexandria as a tech consultant, she is abducted in Egypt’s post revolutionary chaos, with only a copy of the philosopher Maimonides’ famous A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED.  Led to read this book, by having read Peter Hessler’s The Buried (Egypt then and now…archaeology and the revolution), I was not disappointed but totally enhralled by her strategizing and well crafted novel. Her jealous sister takes over her husband and daughter when she has to send a death video.  One anticipates this as in the beginning, when children, Judith leaves her in a pit, into which the children have made her crawl and take away the ladder, an act of cruelty which causes one to anticipate the ensuing events.  

A century earlier, Cambridge Professor Solomon Schechter arrives in Egypt, hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue.  The chapters, like Peter’s book, alternate between Josie’s story, Judith’s story, with her husband and daughter, and the abductor’s terrorism, where they want to use their software for their own purposes, and the discoveries of Professor Schechter.  .  It all hangs together and each episode comments on and furthers the previous one.  A spellbinding book, the review says, and I totally agree.  It is about how our digital records changes memory and how" memory shapes the soul."

What is described is a photo archive of one’s life, which now is pretty commonplace.  But perhaps not in 2013. What is so enthralling…is that each chapter is a surprize and opens up a new prism of perception.  The final chapter is a mirror image.