In Jonathan Levi’s Septimania, the protagonist, Malory, discovers himself to be descended from the rulers of a short-lived 8th-century Jewish kingdom in southwestern France. (Septimania was in fact a medieval principality with a significant Jewish population.) The author, writes Michael Weingrad, “whips history, mathematics, politics, music, theater, and religion into his soufflé,” not to mention a 17th-century parallel plotline involving Isaac Newton and, above all, the story of Malory’s love for the beautiful Luiza. In his review, Weingrad concludes that the book, while succeeding as a love story, fails to live up to its own ambitions:
Septimania . . . gestures throughout at real-world history, politics, and ideas, and here the book is mushy. The problem is not just the occasional over-prettiness, though at least some of the magic on offer in Levi’s novel is the glamor of a certain kind of wealth and cultural capital. . . . The real issue is that, while Septimania presents itself as a novel of ideas, it’s really a novel of just one. As Malory learns, the book’s big themes, from Newtonian physics to Islamist jihad, are in the end all just fragmentary gropings after the One True Answer revealed at the book’s conclusion: Love. “Newton was looking, as Malory was looking,” writes Levi, “as perhaps the rocks, planets, the stars, the oranges on the branches of the trees of the Giardino degli Aranci were looking—they were all looking for sympathy. For sympathy. For love.”
Now maybe the oranges in Rome are looking for love, and maybe they’re not, but there is a difference between aesthetics and history, and Septimania lyrically blurs the two rather than tracing the true edge between them. One also notices the absence of any mention of Israel, curious in a Mediterranean-spanning novel that is so concerned with Jewish kingdoms, history, and searches for home. . . . In Septimania . . . the king of the Jews jets from England to Italy to New York, but does not bother with the most intricate, enchanting, and, yes, cosmopolitan Jewish kingdom that includes the cities of present-day Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
But that is to push the novel where it does not want to go.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2498/the-exilarchs-lost-princess/