Septimania

February 15, 2016
Highly intelligent, insanely ambitious, and restlessly imaginative, Levi’s (A Guide for the Perplexed) novel is also so recondite that any attempt to accurately describe its plot risks sounding like madness. And yet everything begins simply enough, with a young organ tuner named Malory falling in love with a Cambridge-educated mathematician named Luiza as they discuss music and metaphysics inside St. George’s Church in Cambridge. When Luiza becomes pregnant, the pair relocate to Rome—but before she can give birth, Malory is approached by a man called Settimio with ties to an organization founded in 1666 by Isaac Newton. Settimio reveals that Malory is the direct heir of Charlemagne and King David and the true ruler of the kingdom of Septimania, and he is tasked with finding the One True Rule that explains mathematics, science, and the universe. Settimio takes Malory to the Sanctum Sanctorum, a massive library that contains an alternate origin of the three major world religions, at which point the novel becomes an ornate scholastic quest that invokes Arabian Nights, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and secret agents. But the biggest secrets of all are those kept by Malory’s enigmatic friend Tibor, from Romania, who alone can answer the one question all Malory’s learning cannot solve: what became of Luiza and her child? Strange, sprawling, and an obvious labor of love, Septimania might overwhelm the casual reader, but 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.

February 15, 2016
In Levi's (A Guide to the Perplexed, 1992) long-awaited second novel, a failed Ph.D. candidate, expelled from Cambridge's Trinity College, learns he's king of Septimania, the land given to the Jews of eighth-century France by Charlemagne. It's 1978. Malory, an accomplished organist and tuner, is approached by pale and fragile young Louiza, a mathematical genius, while he works on the organ in St. George's Church. As they talk, Louiza spins mathematical formulas that convince her the pair share a destiny. They make love. Unknowingly impregnated, Louiza is promptly coerced and locked away by American Cold Warriors to tackle the math that will destroy communism. Malory, not realizing he'll be a father, searches for her. Then Malory's grandmother dies, bequeathing him a worn antique notebook. It's a diary written by a friend of Isaac Newton during a year in Newton's life lost to history. On the last page, in Newton's hand, is written, "I have found the One True Rule...that guides the Universe." Levi's narrative is linear, shifting from England to Rome to post-9/11 America, with flashbacks to Newton's era, Charlemagne's conquests, and Scheherazade's tales. As Malory seeks Louiza and, through a strange series of events, becomes king of Septimania, the narrative moves to Rome, where Malory takes residence in Septimania's plush villa enclosing its sanctum sanctorum, an overflowing antiquarian library. The reclusive Louiza and naif Malory earn sympathy, while supporting players like Antonella, a beautiful Italian girl at Cambridge, and La Principessa and Tibor, refugees from Communist Romania, fill Levi's narrative with esoteric meditations, allusions, and metaphors on quantum behavior, the Grand Unified Theory, Bach, music, love and loss, the nature of numerology, and Schrodinger's cat, all laced with philosophy and wit--"The digital alarm blinked out the minutes of the early hours with a spastic colon." A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.

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Starred review from March 15, 2016
Levi, author of A Guide for the Perplexed (1992) and cofounder of Granta, 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. Chief among these is Malorythe peculiar and tiny organ scholar at Trinity College, Cambridgeand his amore, Louiza, the math genius whom Malory repeatedly loses and accidentally finds, then loses again. But to say their love is the focus of this complex novel is to promulgate an injustice: What about the pip, the music, the dying, the birth, Rome, Septimania (part of what is now France, where Malory is king), Caliph Haroun al Rashid, Charlemagne, Louiza's equation, and Newton's law of universal gravitation? Literary, musical, and mathematical references abound, and readers will need to brush up on Dante, keep a dictionary at hand, and be 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 Perez 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)