I got this book when I noticed it in the library to pick up another one, because I really liked Great Small Things a previous novel by Picoult. It is written entirely in the fist person singular. But after 46 pages of utterly incomprehensible confusing discussion about the archeology of ancient Egyptian tombs containing the said named book along with numerous Egyptian myths, I was almost ready to give up. The next chapter is back in Boston where she is married with a daughter and working as a death doula, a kind of councillor to the dying in a hospice. Then it is back to Egypt in 2017, after 15 years to search in the the tomb of Djehutynakht with her Yale professor. It appears that they are intermittent lovers and at other times enemies and that everything comes as pairs- two tombs, two lives, at least two Books of Two Ways, and two aspirations for herself. It becomes like the electron in the quantum physics course that her husband teaches at Harvard. It is simultaneously in two places with two different spins. Or it may be like Schrodinger’s cat that is simultaneously alive and dead. To me this just emphasizes our profound ignorance about how the universe works, in spite of the advances of modern physicists. She muses about the multiverse or many parallel universes of quantum theory as she listens in on one of his lectures. Free will is reduced to the direction of spin of an electron. The row of Egyptian tombs becomes a parallel universe to her life in Boston, each with an unfaithful partner. Dark matter becomes the fill-in explanation for what would otherwise be a mystery.
The plot becomes significantly more complex in the last part of the book, with a surprising paternity revelation, a plane crash, and an undelivered letter to an illegitimate son as his mother is dying.
I could never develop a clear mental picture of the layout of the Dig the site where archeology students primarily from Yale dig out the tombs and read the accompanying hieratic and hieroglyphic texts. And although the writing is superb, all of the characters are too introspective, forever undergoing self analysis, sensitive to perceived insult, and emotional for my taste. The endless myths of dozens of Egyptian gods that change from one form of life to another do not endear me to them at all. The obsession with sex and death are at times overpowering.
I was a bit disappointed in this book.
6/10.
The Passionate Reader 