settingshadow reviewed A guide for the perplexed by Dara Horn
Review of 'A guide for the perplexed' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Man, this book was overwritten. I think Horn must have intended it to be exclusively read by high school freshman literature classes. In fact, I believe that to such an extent, I feel a little bad about not writing this review as a five-paragraph essay. "How could that be a bad thing?" You might ask. Here's an example: Horn wanted to do a modern retelling of the story of Joseph and Judah. Great, fine. Classic stories have meaning in our time and all that jazz. But Horn worried that we might not get how clever she was being. So she named her Joseph character "Josephine" and her Judah character "Judith" and had them literally go to Egypt. The Tamar stand-in? "Itamar," of course. We're too stupid to catch anything less on-the-nose. (By the way, this lead to a hilarious and bizarre passage in which we were supposed to believe that …
Man, this book was overwritten. I think Horn must have intended it to be exclusively read by high school freshman literature classes. In fact, I believe that to such an extent, I feel a little bad about not writing this review as a five-paragraph essay. "How could that be a bad thing?" You might ask. Here's an example: Horn wanted to do a modern retelling of the story of Joseph and Judah. Great, fine. Classic stories have meaning in our time and all that jazz. But Horn worried that we might not get how clever she was being. So she named her Joseph character "Josephine" and her Judah character "Judith" and had them literally go to Egypt. The Tamar stand-in? "Itamar," of course. We're too stupid to catch anything less on-the-nose. (By the way, this lead to a hilarious and bizarre passage in which we were supposed to believe that a character whose last name is "Ashkenazi" -- to contrast her husband, Mr. Mizrahi, of course -- convinced an entire room of people that she wasn't Jewish, without pulling out a fake name.)
At times, it seemed that Horn was so hellbent on literary cleverness that I completely lost track of what she was even trying to accomplish. The Mizrahi/Ashkenazi naming quirk mentioned above, for instance, or why asthma is a recurring theme.
The central concept of the book -- do literal memories help us, or simply accumulate like sacred trash in a Genizah, was possibly interesting, but again dealt with in such a heavy handed way. The computer program to accumulate memories is called genizah, leaving no doubt to the reader what Horn what the reader's opinion to be and then layered with the additional stories of Rambam and Solomon Schecter and their interactions with the Cairo Genizah.
All in all, the extremely clumsy writing was so distracting that I got barely anything out of this book, but for the group that sent it to me, the PJ Library, a charity encouraging the modern Jewry to retain ties to their Jewish roots, that's probably right up their alley. I was shocked when I realized it actually was picked up by a formal publishing group outside of the Jewish world; I have no idea who else would read it.
Finally, I feel the need to be consistent in my complaining about the use of non-English languages, even though in this case, my Hebrew comprehension is good enough that it didn't personally affect me. Non-English languages should be used in English books only to set tone. If important information is conveyed it should be translated into English. Obnoxiously Horn walked all over that opinion: she both had important conversations carried out in transliterated Hebrew (which also, ugh! Those of us who understand Hebrew understand, so if you're going to be that obnoxious, go all the way and just use Hebrew characters) and then totally banal things unnecessarily translated, like "'sweetie', he called to her in Hebrew"