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Reviews
of In the Image Include:
"An
enchanting, introspective and emotionally charged debut."
Publishers Weekly
"With Leora in particular, the author has created a
woman of depth and complexity whose emotions and reactions
often resonate with accuracy. Even those characters embodying
the worst of human nature are compelling." Library
Journal
"[T]old with moral passion, vigor, humor, and an unflagging
fascination with the coincidences, miseries, grotesqueries,
and triumphs of life." Richard Snow, American Heritage
"A gripping story told with learning and passion. It
does not just use Jewish sources, it breathes them, and
breathes into them the breath of life." Rabbi David
Wolpe, author of Why Be Jewish?
:
"This is a lovely book that will give pleasure to many
readers, and it signals the beginning of an interesting
career". Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover
"[I]t may be the most ambitious and accomplished first
novel I have ever read." Melvin Jules Bukiet, author
of Strange Fire
"I left the novel spellbound by the breadth of Horn's
imagination and the generosity of her vision." Andrew
Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers
and the Multicultural Dilemma
"A tender and touching story of vanished worlds and
recovered lives." Thane Rosenbaum, author of The
Golems of Gotham
Reading Group Discussion Guide:
1.
The novel begins with a description of the main characters,
Leora and Bill Landsmann, as "tourists." What
makes them tourists, besides their travels? Can one ever
stop being a tourist in this sense?
2.
Several characters in the novel intentionally change their
identities, some by embracing religion, others by rejecting
it. What do the different characters-Jason, Leah, and Nadav,
among others-gain or lose through these choices? When a
person makes the choice to reject or embrace religion at
the beginning of the twentieth century, are they making
the same choice as a person faced with the same question
one hundred years later?
3.
While the characters move frequently between Europe and
America, the novel ends literally beneath the Statue of
Liberty. What kind of picture of America emerges from the
novel, from sweatshops to Costco? What opportunities does
America offer the characters, and what burdens do those
opportunities bring with them?
4.
This is a novel of modern Jewish history but, unlike so
many novels on this subject, it is emphatically not a novel
about anti-Semitism, or even about the Holocaust. Instead,
the book's tragedies are tragic in the true sense-the characters
are generally not innocent victims, and they bring disaster
upon themselves. Does this make the book's many catastrophes
easier to understand, or harder? How does this approach
change your view of Jewish history?
5.
A central theme of the book is the idea of reclamation:
ritual objects thrown overboard appear a century later in
a junk shop, pieces of coal resurface millennia later as
diamonds, a primitive skull is discovered, a neglected dollhouse
is restored, and the novel's ending reveals a vast underwater
treasury of lost things. In Chapter 8's explanation of diamond
formation, we are told that "Nothing is ever really
lost." But a Jewish new year ceremony, enacted in the
novel near the end of Chapter 7, consists of symbolically
casting one's sins away in order to start a new year. Does
it work? Can people be forgiven? If it is true that nothing
is ever lost, is that a blessing or a curse?
6.
On page 124, Jake tells Leora that "just because life
doesn't work the way you want it to doesn't mean that what
happens in the world is completely random. The times when
people really do interact with God are exactly those times
when life doesn't work out fairly." Is this observation
borne out in the novel? In reality?
7.
Near the end of the biblical Book of Job, in answer to Job's
questions about why he has suffered so undeservedly, God
responds by describing the many unfathomable wonders of
the world he has created, asking Job if he knows, for example,
where the storehouses of snow are kept, or how God sets
the boundaries of the sea (see Job chapters 38-41). In "The
Book of Hurricane Job" in the novel (Chapter 10), God
responds to Bill Landsmann's questions by recounting the
private moments of the novel's many characters. What kind
of limitations of human understanding does this suggest?
How much do the characters in the novel really know about
one another, and how much do they miss? How much can people
ever know about one another?
8.
God concludes his words to Bill Landsmann by saying, "I
created you in my image. I am not created in yours!"
(page 267). Much of the novel is devoted to images and re-creations:
museums figure prominently; paintings appear by Vermeer
and Rembrandt; Naomi Landsmann makes copies of famous works
of art; photographs take on large significance; miniature
enthusiasts create exact replicas of material life; and
Bill Landsmann assembles a collection of thousands of slides.
When are these images successful, and when do they fail?
Are there limitations on human creativity?
9.
Speaking of his father, Nadav Landsmann, on page 184, Bill
Landsmann says, "It is often said that we are shaped
by our experiences, but I do not believe that's true. .
. . I think we are not shaped by our experiences, but by
what we do choose-by how we react to our experiences."
Do you believe him? For which of the characters in the novel
might this be true?
10.
On page 255, the novel borrows language from the story of
Cain and Abel to describe Isaac's death. Is Nadav actually
responsible for Isaac's death? Why does he consider himself
to be? Is he responsible for his wife's fate? Which affects
him more: his actual experience or what he makes of it?
11.
Besides the Book of Job, there are many references to the
Hebrew bible and to Jewish literature scattered throughout
the novel. A few of many examples: in the first chapter,
the story of Leora and Bill Landsmann's ascent up East Mountain
borrows language from the biblical binding of Isaac in Genesis
22; in Chapter 4, at the suicide of the aspiring singer
Joe Solovey (himself named after the character of a prodigy
cantor in a Yiddish novel by Sholem Aleichem), the novel
quotes the Talmud by saying he "unable to complete
his work, but never free to desist from it" (page 100);
and at the beginning of Chapter 6, the story of the two
countries where no one is able to sleep is adapted from
a mystical story by eighteenth-century rabbi Nachman of
Bratslav. Does one need to recognize these allusions, or
others like them, in order to appreciate the novel? For
the modern reader, are these references another example
of how people misread one another? Or are they another example
of reclamation?
12.
The novel begins with the words, "Accidents of fate
are rarely fatal accidents." Which ultimately dominates
the novel: free will or fate?
Other
Titles by Dara Horn:
Excerpts from my Journal, 1993
Links:
In the
Image a novel by Dara Horn
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DARA
HORN is an award-winning novelist, essayist, professor,
and scholar, as well as an obsessive traveler, note-taker,
and collector of other people's stories. Born in 1977,
she graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in
1999 and received her master's degree in modern Hebrew
literature from Cambridge University in 2000. She is
currently a doctoral candidate in comparative literature
at Harvard University, studying Hebrew and Yiddish.
Her first novel, In the Image, published by W.W. Norton
when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book
Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the
2003 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish fiction. It was
also chosen as one of the Best Books of 2002 by the
San Francisco Chronicle and one of the Top Five Novels
of 2002 by the Christian Science Monitor (which called
it "a work of raw genius"), along with rave
reviews throughout the United States and overseas. Her
work has appeared in many national and international
publications, including American Heritage, Science,
the Forward, Hadassah and others, and she has also worked
for Newsweek, Time, and The New Republic. She has taught
courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at
Harvard and at Sarah Lawrence College, and has lectured
at universities and cultural institutions throughout
the United States and Canada. She lives with her husband
in New York City, where she is completing her second
novel.