Jonathan Levi (1)Rezensionen

Have you ever found yourself in a dream that is just totally fucked up and makes no sense, but you're dreaming, you have no choice, and the dream just goes on until you finally wake up in a cold sweaty bed needing a change of sheets, a hot shower and mug of cocoa?

Well this is the literary version, and it's someone else's fucked up dream you're stuck in.

I say 'you're stuck in', like you couldn't just delete it from your Kindle if you wanted to, but that's the thing, you just don't want to. Like the fucked up dream, you just seem to be stuck in it and you have to wait until the end when it releases you back to reality.

I won't say more as i wouldn't want to spoil it for any literary masochists out there, other than buyer beware. It will seriously disturb you that you wasted your time reading it, but once you start reading it you'll be in it until the end - you have been warned!

In “a fable of fantastical lushness” (New York Times Book Review), Levi weaves together the stories of two strangers and their mysterious travel agent to present an extraordinarily crafted revisionist history of the discovery of America, combining the erudition of Umberto Eco with the ingenious storytelling of A Thousand and One Nights.

I did not enjoy this book at all. It may be that it was all just over my head, but I also found it boring, disjointed and irrational. The one redeeming thing I took from this novel is that there actually was a King/Kingdom of Septimania - he ruled for approx 140 years, and it is a lost fact of history! Please see Boris Feldman's review (April 12, 2016) for a link to a review of his book for details about the true story!

I found this book difficult to get my head around. I quite liked the central character as a person, but the meanderings into parallel fantasies did me in. Probably too cerebral for me at my time of life.½

I could hardly put this book down. It was kind of surrealistic. It had the hidden history thing going on kind of like Dan Brown and some mystical characteristics. The characters were very original. There were joyous and heartfelt times throughout the story. I really enjoyed this story. It was one that you wanted to get to the end to see how things ended but you didn't want the story to end.