Septimania: A Novel - Hardcover

Levi, Jonathan

3.26

204 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468312480 ISBN 13: 9781468312485

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2016

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On an spring afternoon in 1978 in the loft of a church outside Cambridge, England, an organ tuner named Malory loses his virginity to a dyslexic math genius named Louiza. When Louiza disappears, Malory follows her trail to Rome. There, the quest to find his love gets sidetracked when he discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, given by Charlemagne to the Jews of eighth-century France. In the midst of a Rome reeling from the kidnappings and bombs of the Red Brigades, Malory is crowned King of the Jews, Holy Roman Emperor and possibly Caliph of All Islam. Over the next fifty years, Malory’s search for Louiza leads to encounters with Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Romanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, an elephant that changes color, a shadowy U.S. spy agency and one of the 9/11 bombers, an appleseed from the original Tree of Knowledge, and the secret history of Isaac Newton and his discovery of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. It is the quest of a Candide for love and knowledge, and the ultimate discovery that they may be unified after all.

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About the Author:

Jonathan Levi is an American writer and producer. A founding editor of Granta magazine, Levi is author of two novels, A Guide for the Perplexed and Septimania. His short stories and articles have appeared in many publications including Granta, Cond� Nast Traveler, GQ, Terra Nova, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and his plays and opera libretti have been performed all over the world. Born in New York, he currently lives in Rome, Italy.

Review:

“There is a hint of Harry Potter about the start of Jonathan Levi's immensely ambitious Septimania. Septimania has the format of a novel, but it has roots in the folk-tales of The Arabian Nights. It reaches out to epic, in the form of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and to Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It takes in the sad modern world of refugees and terrorism, plots and code-breakers. And it’s a love story, too. More than one reading will be needed to digest Mr. Levi’s comprehensive, many-branching vision. It adds new dimensions to the idea of the novel.”
- The Wall Street Journal

“Stupendous.”
- �lvaro Enrigue, The New York Times Book Review, “By the Book”

“Levi creates an energetically brilliant, genre-defying masterpiece filled with lavish descriptions, mysteries intertwined with history and legend, and a large cast of memorable, offbeat characters. [B]e prepared to stay up late savoring every word. Although it’s a literary dream of a book, it’s also a storyteller’s work of magic, and a fantastically suspenseful adventure, along the lines of Arturo P�rez Reverte’s The Flanders Panel (1994) and Iain Pears’ The Dream of Scipio (2002), told with the aplomb and smart humor of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen.”
- Booklist (starred review)

“[L]aced with philosophy and wit. A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.”
- Kirkus

“Highly intelligent, insanely ambitious, and restlessly imaginative, Levi’s novel is also so recondite that any attempt to accurately describe its plot risks sounding like madness...Levi’s vast creation pays off once you give in to its unique fusion of history, music, and the origin of belief in invisible things.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Intellectually fascinating and emotionally powerful, the tale that follows is a poignant meditation on youth, love, myth, history, and quantum theory.”
- Chicago Review of Books

“Reading Jonathan Levi’s new novel Septimania is like dancing on a moving stage; it’s exhilarating, even as you worry that your feet might fly out from under you.”
- The Seattle Times

“Septimania is a masterpiece: a rule-bending, category-smashing, delightful work of brilliance that combines history and longing and religion and timelessness with good old-fashioned story-telling.”
- Bill Buford, author of Heat and Among the Thugs

“Jonathan Levi’s novel Septimania is both a compelling, fun mystery and a philosophical love story. In these pages, the musical prose combined with profound, complex ideas is masterful.”
- Jennifer Clement, author of Prayers for the Stolen and The Widow Basquiat

“A richly imagined, complex tapestry of gleaming threads woven through the centuries to converge in a glorious epiphany. This is realism as magical as the best of Garc�a M�rquez.”
- Homerjo Aridjis, author of 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile

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