Dara Horn's latest is yet another amazing novel that once again has come out a bit under the radar, much to my surprise. She's too good to be under the radar! Eternal Life bears a significant comparison with Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, in which the main character comes to life again after every death she experiences. Unlike the Atkinson character, however, Rachel was born 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. Horn's descriptions of 1st century Jerusalem and the life of her young Jewish heroine are rich and exciting, combining what's got to be a ridiculous amount of research and a fertile imagination. In the present time, Rachel deals with contemporary issues like figuring out how to die and be reborn when a digital signature might follow her. This becomes especially difficult after her granddaughter takes a sample of her DNA without permission. But some patterns are all too familiar. A group of ill-informed protestors gather outside her business in New Jersey, an innocuous event to most of her family but a frightful reminder for Rachel. "She could hardly think of a time when it hadn't started this way, with people yelling outside her store." Rachel has seen it all - the only thing that really surprises her is when a male lover helps out with the housework.
Like her previous novel, The Guide for the Perplexed, Horn impeccably mixes the seemingly incongruous worlds of slightly futuristic (though plausible) technology with ancient Judaism and makes it look easy. Of course, the hyper-computing of today, with its general goal of collecting data, is not too dissimilar to the goals of Rachel's scribe father, capturing the written word of religious figures of the day.
I love the intellectual challenge Horn's books offer - this book is funny, and sad, and smart. It's a real treat for the imagination, and as I also do when I read her work, I learned a lot.
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