From the incomparable Dara Horn's In the Image

Here's a writer whose scholarship is so deep, and yet so human, whose sense of the past is so close, whose characters are original enough to be truly intriguing, yet so much part of our human family that we cannot help but empathize, comes one of her earlier books (before the brilliant The World to Come, and A Guide to the Perplexed), In the Image.

The only warning I'd give any reader is be prepared to be surprised, and the hope that you become involved enough to follow her down wild ravines of thought, into multiple ways of being that came before us, the link between languages (Hebrew) and slang (Yiddish), the effect immigration has on all of them...

But please don't let me bore you with abstract synopses, let me just show you some of the lines that lifted me right up and out of myself:

'Once, years earlier, searching for something in the dictionary, Leora's eye had come to rest, by accident, on the word "translate."  One of its definitions, she remembered ... was "to bring over to the afterlife, without causing death."'

(wait, wait, I thought, am I reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead??)

I also liked getting firm definitions of what I consider to be NY slang (& its correct spelling -- nerdy, yes, I KNOW):

'Mentsch means 'person,' literally, but it's used to mean a really good person.  Someone who shows the world, through his actions, what it really means to be a person.' 

At a zoo (hey!  Prison for animals!), she and her boyfriend are checking out the seal exhibit where a trainer is showing the difference between seals and sea lions:

'Sammy the Seal received the usual number of laughs as the zookeeper coaxed him out of the water to tease him, showing all the things that Sammy couldn't do.  Yet Sammy the Seal bore it like a humble martyr, ignoring the crowd as he waddled his way onto the demonstration rock and sometimes not even accepting the sardines thrown his way as reparations.  Sammy knew who he was, Leora thought, and [watched him] as he dove into the water, soaring, with a grace the sea ions would never have, beneath its depths.'

And speaking of war (particularly the WWII), she says 'rewrite the script so that was was lost is what really was lost' -- by which she means not beautiful things, gorgeous apartments, precious jewels, 'but a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God.'

At another point in the book she's in a strange curio shop, one that features, among many other things, bones, human and otherwise, and it includes a series of the 'skulls of people...grinning from earhole to earhole. ... She began to notice that she wasn't watching them as much as they were watching her.  The grins disturbed her most of all.  How strange, she thought, that one needs to be alive in order to frown.'

(So perhaps death really will be one long frolic!)

She also comes across earlier 'commandments' and notices that they are written in an 'if/then' manner.  IF you sacrifice enough goats, keep the sabbath, etc etc, THEN rain shall fall on your crops, your children won't die, etc' -- and it occurs to her how absolutely conditional must God's love be, to follow such a formula!

(Yes there's a lot about God, and religion, and Judaism, old and new, but this book is more like a mystery, compelling the reader to find out what unheard-of ends these characters come to -- and no, I don't mean -- necessarily! -- grisly ones).

And while I studied Philosophy in school, and read Spinoza, I never truly understood how wildly different his conception of God was -- 
'He deduced that the entire universe was formed from one type of matter, which one could call God, and through a series of logical statements he determined that this meant that all God's creations, and in fact the entire world, was simply an extension of God.  This meant that God couldn't interact with his creatures, so to speak, since God and his creatures were one and the same.'

How prescient, how futuristic, how -- can I just say this again?  Tibetan of him!

'Leah wanted a life made up of moments, not minutes.'

Later, 'Leah cried and cried until she forgot what she was crying about, which was of course the purpose of crying in the first place.'

Here's a theme close to my heart -- or rather, my head:
'It was torture, not being able to sleep.  And what was even more disturbing was the realization of how easy it is to forget to sleep.  Sleeping isn't natural, she thought.  Babies have to learn how to sleep through the night, mastering it only after many months of agony.  During her nights of sleeplessness, Leora had discovered that sleep is a delicate gift, so delicate that even the slightest thought before bed can knock it out of place ... and soon thoughts would begin piling on top of each other, one after another, her mind grinding and groaning like the cogs of some unstoppable machine.'

How precisely right!

And later, on a slightly similar theme:
'Once you forget how to tell time, you realize that telling time is only the beginning, for time is the one thing that binds us to everyone else in the world.'

And an old man driving through Manhattan finds that:
'The city...seemed to be teeming with young people.  It was as if there had been some law enacted forbidding anyone over thirty-nine from living there.'

Okay, I'ma stop there.
But let me tell you, the last chapter -- it's a stunner.

THANK YOU, DARA HORN, for your brilliance, your amazingly life-like characters and their seemingly random lives, and for your capacity to scrutinize the moment, and come up with its meaning.