Pinta, Nina and Maimonides : A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED, <i> By Jonathan Levi (Turtle Bay Books: $20; 319 pp.)</i>

Cleverness can be like a stutter. We can get distracted from what is said because of the way it is being said. Except that the stutterer’s urgency to express himself will burn through the handicap, while some kinds of cleverness may strike us as a way to mask a lack of urgency.

Jonathan Levi’s historical-philosophical fantasy is generally clever, always ambitious, sometimes provocative and often entertaining; yet it turns into its own mask. It winds together such things as the discovery of America, the Arab settlement in Spain, the expulsion of the Jews, an argument for linking Flamenco song, Bach’s music and the Sephardic Kol Nidre, the repeatedly transformed figure of the Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and the Wandering Jew, also repeatedly transformed, as a symbol of all Jews and perhaps of all humanity.

Told through the dream-like encounters and recollections of two present-day travelers in Spain, “A Guide for the Perplexed”--the title of Maimonides’ masterwork--holds our curiosity for a while. We accumulate questions, and answers are fed teasingly back. Curiosity dulls after a while, yet answers keep coming even after we are no longer asking questions. The author sits cross-legged, finishing the puzzle he has set out.

Levi’s excursion begins with two women stranded by a strike in the airport of Mariposa, a fictional city in southwestern Spain not far from the port Columbus sailed from. One is Holland, an English filmmaker who has just recorded a performance of a Bach partita by Sandor, a world-renowned violinist. The other is Hanni, an old widow who has come from Miami to search for a lost manuscript demonstrating that her ancestor Esau, a Spanish Jew, sailed with Columbus and was in fact the discoverer of the American mainland.

Hanni and Holland in the airport are described with fleeting realism, but it is the realism of Alice as she is about to fall down the rabbit hole. Thereafter, their encounters, adventures and flashbacks have the comically or mysteriously arbitrary quality of Wonderland, as well as a good deal of its didacticism.

Each woman has had her trip arranged by Ben, a cosmological travel agent. He directs the odd things that happen to them in what turns out to be a voyage of philosophical and historical enlightenment. Each has a copy of his tourist guide, entitled, naturally, “Guide for the Perplexed.” Ben, it will be suggested at the end of the book’s myriad twists and turns, is Hanni’s son and the father of Holland’s daughter. He is also the latest incarnation of Maimonides, who moved in the upheavals of his time from North Africa to Egypt, and whose writing sought to reconcile classical learning with religious belief.

Maimonides, Ben and other variations who appear in the book teach travel of all kinds, and travel is the central theme and image. “We are all Jews,” one of the characters declares; “Our survival is in our motion.” To Levi, Queen Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was not their setback but their glory. Clearly no Zionist, he suggests that not only the Jews but all men fulfill their civilizing mission by wandering. Ben, the wanderers’ magus, had arranged the boatloads of Vietnam refugees, the flotillas of Cubans from Mariel, the escape of Eastern Europeans through the Iron Curtain, the exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and--no Zionist either--the travels of PLO leaders between Tunis and Beirut.

A whole section is devoted to the manuscript of Esau, which turns up in the violin case of a pupil of Sandor’s who, it turns out, is also Holland’s daughter. The book’s turnings-up, turnings-out and general turnings-into--its transformations--are successively intriguing, dizzying, wearying and static.

Esau’s letter, however, approaches a straightforward narrative and an interesting one. There are digressions--one concerns some magical violin strings belonging to the daughter of a Medieval Arab noble and his Jewish wife--but mostly it is a droll and suggestive alternate history.

Esau, son of a Jewish map-maker, is taken from his family by Santangel, one of Queen Isabella’s mightiest ministers and a reluctant convert from Judaism. Knowing the Jews will be expelled, Santangel wants to find a haven for them. Poring over maps and travelers’ accounts for seven years, Esau “discovers” America for his patron. Santangel bundles him and nine other Jews--a Minyan--aboard Columbus’ ships. Columbus insists he is heading for the East Indies; Esau and Santangel know better.

At the end of his account, Esau will have clambered ashore in Florida, where he settles among some baseball-playing Indians, marries a princess and fathers a line of American Jews. True, one character points out, the descendants of an Indian mother are not technically Jewish; but the purpose of the book and its author--as of Maimonides and his avatars--is to expand, not restrict, the possibilities.

The Esau section is told, with a touch of facetious archaism, as a chronicle of the time; with some of the effect of John Barth’s “The Sotweed Factor.” It can be whimsical and long-winded, but it succeeds on the whole, and it is the brightest part of the book.

Hanni’s and Holland’s encounters and conversations, on the other hand, grow tedious and confusing. The spirit of Ben--we meet him mainly through their letters to him--hangs over them like the shadow of a Prospero at discount. There are talks with gnomic and discursive rock-singers, a barman, a taxi driver and a Peruvian travel agent. They are themselves but, in the most portentous and discouraging possible way, they are also part of the spirit of History that Hanni and Holland are filling up on.

Their instruction, relentlessly verbal, is not merely that. There are also instructive metamorphoses. When Hanni goes to Germany at 18 with her father--they work as the Gestapo’s designated Jewish travel agents, and smuggle out Jews in their clients’ packing cases--she turns blond and grows Marlene Dietrich-like cheekbones. After Holland has Ben’s baby, she suddenly grows tall and voluptuous.

It is all meanings, suggestions and connections but, except for some parts of the Esau story, the figures meant, suggested and connected are literary abstractions caught in a traffic jam. “Guide” is a treasure hunt held indoors, all clues and few of the countryside wanderings that are a treasure hunt’s real point. Levi has written an academic game that runs down, an echo (muffled) of Eco (Umberto).